Page 32 of Worth of Waste

She could do that.

“Ready.”

“Ouch, he bit me!” Kathy said as she put Junior in front of the backdrop once more.

Karen wasn’t surprised, if only because that was a new thing for her son, and she’d had a couple of complaints from his daycare about it over the last week. “It’s a thing he’s doing.”

“Should bite him back.”

“Step back,” Corrine muttered, “he just wants his mom and his cake.”

Karen squatted down to Junior’s level, and all over again, his tantrum was seemingly done, his pearly white teeth flashing in a grin at the sight of his mother. She sat the cake in front of him, helped him to blow on the big number one candle resting in the very middle, and then waited to see what the baby would do.

Junior did nothing.

“Come on, J,” Karen said. “It’s cake, baby.”

He stared between the cake, and his mother, never moving a muscle.

“Stick one of his hands in the frosting and then move out of the way,” Corrine suggested.

“But—”

“Trust me, it works every time. They just need a taste to understand.”

Karen went ahead and grabbed Junior’s chubby little hand in her own, and then dragged the tips of his tiny fingers through the top of the cake. Then, she put his hand close to his mouth, his pink lips opening automatically at the sight of something colorful on his fingers that he might be able to eat.

Babies were a lot of things, but constant and predictable were the most common traits they shared. Junior was no exception to that rule. At a year old, he was still smack dab in the middle of the stage where if he found something on the floor that even looked remotely edible, it was going into his mouth. And if someone put something in his hand that looked like it might taste good, he was going to try and eat that, too.

Karen found herself on her knees, trying to coax Junior to open his mouth, far more than she wanted to admit. This was one stage in her baby’s life she would be glad to see go. It scared her sometimes.

“See,” Corrine said, a smugness to her tone.

Sure enough, the second Junior had gotten a taste of the frosting on the cake, his brown eyes widened, and he grabbed for more. Karen took a step back, giving Corrine lots of room to take shots of the baby and his first year cake smash. Junior no longer cared that Karen was more than a few feet away from him because his focus was only on shoving as much cake and frosting into his sweet face as he could.

By the time he was finished, he was covered in pieces of chocolate cake, and his skin and clothes were stained from top to bottom with blue and red frosting. The floor looked like someone had stuck a bomb inside the cake and it had blown up spectacularly.

Junior sucked happily on his fingers, his other hand smacking the chocolate mess he’d made on the floor, as Corrine took her final shots.

“These are going to be great,” she told Karen.

Karen had no doubt. They would certainly be fun to hang up once she had the prints. The hard part would be deciding whether or not she was going to hang them in the apartment, or the lake property.

She still hadn’t made a choice on whether or not to move.

The place was hers, sure, but still …

Karen just didn’t know what to do.

“Now comes the fun part,” Kathy said.

Karen shot her a look over her shoulder. “The cake wasn’t fun?”

Corrine snorted. “No, now we have to clean.”

Ah.

Yeah.