Baking with Baby

Our new neighbors brought us some cupcakes last week, so I figured we should bake them something. (Can't return an empty tupperware, right?) I have this bad habit of browsing foodgawker and opening a million tabs of recipes that look yummy, then getting mad that having so many tabs open makes Safari get cranky, then save the tabs in a folder of bookmarks for later never to think of them again. I figured I might as well use one of those recipes to make something potentially yummy for our neighbors. I ended up making this recipe for sunflower butter cookies with chocolate covered sunflower seeds. They're kind of like peanut butter cookies in texture, kind of crumbly rather than cake-like (but that might be due to the ingredient snafu where I had to coax the brown sugar into moistness).
Grace didn't really do much except get impatient when it took forever to get anything done (especially during the aforementioned ingredient snafu). Then I put her up on my shoulders, she played with my hair and everything was fine. Probably if things had gone more smoothly, I would have thought to have her stir the dry ingredients or dump things into the mixer, but that's what next time is for.

Meat-eater baby

While we were on vacation (about which I definitely have a post or two brewing in my mind), Grace decided that she really likes chicken. She'd eaten it a few times before, but on vacation, she ate it for a few meals as her actual meal, as opposed to a bite or two in addition to eating every french fry in sight. (She also ate fries with ketchup for the first time, but dipping things in ketchup isn't her new favorite thing, and ketchup isn't meat, so we'll save that for later.)
She'd always been a fan of sausage, but most other meats hadn't really interested her for whatever reason (unfamiliar taste, that it requires more chewing than other foods, who knows?). This past week, she's eaten pork chop and steak. It was quite interesting hearing her say "more, more, more" when I was half expecting her to avoid eating it altogether.

Is it about her or is it about me?

Pink or blue or brown or yellow? It's starting out simple, but I can see the complexities that lie ahead. How much of it is about her and how much is about me? How do I separate them out so I can deal with myself on my own time and attempt to minimize projection of my issues onto her development, her experiences, her preferences?

Parenting PRN OR That's How We Roll, Parenting Edition

I first learned of PRN, an abbreviation for the Latin pro re nata, which translates as "in the circumstances", in nursing school, when learning medications. Some medications have a specific (and sometimes rigid) schedule, whereas some medications are given as needed. Pain medications are an example, where a patient will request a dose as they feel they need it. So how does this medical term relate to parenting? I've been mulling over various blog post topics (naps, breastfeeding, meals vs. snacks, etc.) trying to figure out just what it is I'm trying to say here and trying to organize my thoughts on parenting as a whole.

I won't judge you if you don't judge me.

There are a bunch of blog posts and metafilter posts that I've been reading lately that address a similar theme: different lives are different so it's incredibly difficult if not impossible to impose your method onto someone else's situation. Whether it's parenting decisions, health/food decisions, anything. One person's magical miracle cure is another's "been there, done that, didn't work". So why do people feel like their imposition is the exception and that it's ok?

Dry Goods Challenge

I have a weird habit of buying random food that I don't necessarily know what I'm going to use it for and I also have a habit of buying way more food than I really need. Think of how people buy stuff at Costco but I do that kind of thing in normal grocery stores as well. We have a cupboard full of random food that I thought would be a good idea to have mixed with extra items of things that I thought would be a good idea to buy multiples of even though I only needed one. There was that trip to the store where I thought it would be a good idea to have a supply of beans on hand and, hey, beans are cheap so why not buy 8 bags of them? It's kind of how I roll.

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to go through the cupboard and utilize all of the dry goods we have already with minimal purchase of new dry goods. I'll buy produce, dairy, and protein. Hopefully I'll learn new some yummy new recipes.

Baby Rabbit

We (Grace and I) were preparing dinner this evening. She likes to help make dinner sometimes (or at least she likes me to hold her while I prepare  dinner, as opposed to playing or just standing next to me). Tonight I made one of my go to meals of putting a roasting pan full of veggies with some sort of protein on top in the oven and letting them cook for a while. The veggies usually are baby carrots with some other veggies mixed in (sometimes potatoes, sometimes this root vegetable mix I've been getting at Trader Joe's, sometimes with brussels sprouts), then drizzled with olive oil, salt and pepper. The protein is usually chicken of some kind or pork chops.
Today I was mixing some carrots in with the root vegetable mix, when Grace grabbed a carrot and started gnawing on it. Then she grabbed a handful of carrots, presumably for later. While the veggies and chicken were baking, she ate her carrots. She ate maybe a carrot and a half of bites taken from 4 or 5 different carrots. Then she ate a carrot or two of cooked carrot. I knew that she liked cooked carrot, but she hadn't really shown any interest in raw carrot until today. It always surprises me when she shows interest in new things. It's a good thing.