Writing, cooking, and poop diapers

I was going to blog about what I’m cooking for dinner today. ‘Brag’ might be a better word.  I was going to brag that I’m making homemade marinara sauce using fresh tomatoes right now. I was thinking about including pictures, and mentioning that I could happily have an entire blog devoted to cooking and baking. I love cooking and baking, almost as much as I love eating the things that my husband and I cook and bake.

I was going to write about these things, but then my adorable thirteen month old surprised me with a nice big poop diaper. I had to stop everything that I was doing, pause all my thoughts about blogging and stirring my simmering dinner. I had to refocus my attention onto a giant glob of stinky poop.

Aside from the obvious thoughts of multitasking that the event evoked (can I write, blog, cook, and clean poo all within the same hour before the toddler wakes up from his nap?!), I was also reminded that life can be unexpected. Yes, I knew that there would be a poop diaper, or several, today, but I didn’t know when the poo would drop. I didn’t know that it would make me rethink what I had planned to write about in this blog post.

Sometimes I feel like I don’t know how to include that spontaneity into the stories that I write. If a thing is planned, and I know when its going to happen and what effects it will have on my characters, the thing doesn’t feel very spontaneous anymore. Something that may seem spontaneous in real life suddenly becomes a necessary part of a scene, something that I won’t react with surprise to, even if my characters do. It’s not very difficult to create surprises and cliff hangers in stories, but what about those quirky little spontaneous moments? What about poop diapers? Are those different?

Perhaps I include spontaneity in my stories just fine, or what appears to be spontaneity to the reader at least. Maybe these are just the ramblings of a hungry mother of two who wishes that she had cooked something much quicker than homemade marinara for dinner.

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