If you have a baby, I will bring you food.

This morning I made tomato-basil soup (with optional crumbled gorgonzola embellishment), a salad (with optional lemon dressing, toasted almonds, and chopped dried apricot embellishments); then I cut up a pineapple, and baked two baguettes and two dozen lemon madeleines. All before 10:30 a.m. This was to take over to the historian's son and his wife and their three little girls, one of whom is a twelve-day-old infant, and doing very well, thank you.

This leads me to ponder my history as a person who brought food to people who had babies. In my former life, I used to be in charge of arranging meals, etc., for people who were ill or who were indisposed, which for all practical purposes, since my congregation was filled with young procreating couples, meant bringing food to families with a new baby in the mix. I developed a kind of routine--sometimes I would make a quart of spaghetti sauce, bake a loaf of bread, and bring those two things with some dry pasta to the family. If they didn't want to eat it that night, they could freeze it and eat it another day, perhaps a bad day, when everything went wrong: on such a day, having bread and spaghetti sauce in the freezer could be a little good thing.

I was kind of proud of today's production. Maybe it's a little controlling to make the dressing for someone else's salad, but it was fun to do it. And now, I am prepared to extend this offer to any of my readers: if you have a baby, I will bring you dinner. I will package it in appropriate containers, suitable for freezing. I will bring it to your house in a reusable shopping bag, and you just have to let me hold your baby for a little while. That's fair, right?