There was no ice cream.

I spent a majority of our dinnertime together staring at Teagan. Rewind a few hours of whining, crying, hitting and arguing and you'll understand why. 

SO many people tell me to cherish this time, because it only gets harder from here. I know they're trying to be helpful, but these conversations leave me more depressed than encouraged.

So I sat and watched her, trying to imagine the seemingly impossible moment in the unforeseeable future that I would look back on this day and miss her chewing up broccoli and spitting it out, balling up her roll and pushing it around the table and flinging her spaghetti everywhere. We went back and forth about ice cream and the fact that she was required to eat 3 vegetables first. She moved the veggies around on her plate and demanded ice cream, to which I calmly responded (I was oh-so-proud of myself for keeping my cool) that she needed to eat her veggies first. We repeated this conversation at least 10 times, the only difference being the volume of her voice and the clenching of her fists.

I wanted to explode, I wanted to scream, I wanted to fast forward to a time where instead of talking at me incessantly ("Mummy" must escape her lips hundreds of times a day) she could actually function on her own for more than a few minutes.

Instead, I started to think about her driving off in a car for the first time and going on her first date and I really began to believe that I could indeed cherish days like today.

And then she threw a balled-up roll at my face.

There was no ice cream.