Item

My First Pie and Other Sensory Snapshots

Title (Dublin Core)

My First Pie and Other Sensory Snapshots

Disclaimer (Dublin Core)

DISCLAIMER: This item may have been submitted in response to a school assignment prompt. See Linked Data.

Description (Dublin Core)

I gave birth to my first child two months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and so to me, memories of this time are centered around life as a new parent. Because we live in a different state than most of our family, and because we had a newborn (whose immune systems are not well-developed the first several weeks of life) in a global pandemic, we did not go anywhere. I had a few months off of work and school to care for my son, so my experience of COVID-19 to that point was time spent just with my son. As any parent knows, those first few weeks are an exhausting blur consisting of the never-ending cycle of feeding your baby, changing them, and helping them sleep. But the sensory memories from this time of my life that have stuck with me the most involve the feeling of holding my baby; feeling his head on my shoulder, hearing his tiny little breaths and occasional squeaky coos in my ear, noticing the sweet smell of his baby shampoo on his head, feeling him stretch and reposition from time to time. Though it seemed like the days when he would sleep independently would never come, little did I know how quickly they would, and how much I would miss these quiet moments.

When he started getting the hang of napping, I suddenly had these open stretches of time in my day, which I was not used to. What to do to fill this time, especially in the midst of a pandemic and with a baby to boot? Like many people, I developed a baking hobby while my little one napped. Now I associated his nap time with the sticky feel of flour and butter on my hands as I kneaded dough for soda bread, the smell of buttery, sugary deliciousness coming from the oven as scones were baking. On my husband’s birthday, I produced my most time-consuming bake so far: a strawberry rhubarb pie. This one required some cooperation on the part of my little guy, whose giggles I heard as he batted at toys in his baby swing while I chopped and prepped the filling and made the pie crust. The finished product wasn’t necessarily perfect, but I was proud of it, and the memory of making it will always stick with me since it is a representative snapshot of that moment in time, a few months into a global pandemic with my young son.

Date (Dublin Core)

September 27, 2020

Creator (Dublin Core)

Self

Contributor (Dublin Core)

MaryKate Bonadurer

Event Identifier (Dublin Core)

HST643

Partner (Dublin Core)

Arizona State University

Type (Dublin Core)

photograph
story

Controlled Vocabulary (Dublin Core)

English Food & Drink
English Home & Family Life
English Recreation & Leisure

Curator's Tags (Omeka Classic)

newborn
baby
pie
baking
hobby

Contributor's Tags (a true folksonomy) (Friend of a Friend)

Arizona State University
HST 643
sensory history
baking
parenting
baby
strawberry rhubarb pie

Collection (Dublin Core)

Motherhood
Foodways

Linked Data (Dublin Core)

Sensory history submissions and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Date Submitted (Dublin Core)

02/02/2022

Date Modified (Dublin Core)

03/15/2022
06/27/2023

Item sets

Covid 19
Motherhood

This item was submitted on February 2, 2022 by MaryKate Bonadurer using the form “Share Your Story” on the site “A Journal of the Plague Year”: https://covid-19archive.org/s/archive

Click here to view the collected data.

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