Muffins!

We were playing up in the third floor, and I was glancing at an old issue of Cooks Illustrated, when Grace saw a picture of a tray of muffins and shouted "muffins!" I remembered that we had an old box of muffin mix and figured why not? So we went downstairs to make some muffins. I measured the ingredients and Grace poured them into the bowl. We took turns mixing. Waiting for them to cook, she kept grabbing the timer shouting "muffins!" Finally they were done baking, but waiting for them to cool brought more of the same.
Needless to say, the muffins made from an old mix were not really very good. Grace ate a little of one, but I'm thinking it might be ok to chuck the rest and try again tomorrow with better ingredients. As something to do on a rainy day, though, I'd say it was a success.

Putting the theory into practice

Remember how I wrote about the food division of responsibility and how I wanted to help Grace make her own food choices? Well, today that intention was put into practice. We were talking about what to have for breakfast, and she pointed to the cookies and said "cookie, cookie" all cute like. I told her that we could have a cookie at lunch or at dinner, but we'd have something different for breakfast. She had been talking all morning about peaches and grapes, so I was able to distract her from the cookies with those and she was happy.

I'm not pregnant and that's ok.

So many people, people I know in real life as well as people I know of on the internet via their blog or twitter, are either pregnant or recently were pregnant and now have adorable, sqishy newborns. I am not pregnant, nor do I have an adorable, sqishy newborn. There is some part of me, my ovaries or my hormones or something, that is screaming about how I should get pregnant ASAP. It's screaming about how cute newborns are and I should get on it. It's screaming about how the longer I wait to have a second child, the higher the chances are that Grace will wean herself before then and my small desire to tandem nurse will be crushed.

The other part of me, the rational and thoughtful part of me (not to say that people who want more children are irrational, just that the part of me that wants more children RIGHT NOW is irrational), knows that it will be ok to wait to have another baby. It knows the reality of what my days and nights with Grace look like. It knows that Grace still nurses three or four times a day so there's still a possibility that she won't wean before I have a second baby. This part of me also acknowledges that it would also be ok if she weaned before I have a second baby. This part of me knows that my days of having a baby aren't numbered but even if they are, even if I can't have any other children grow inside my body, there are other ways of growing our family. 

So there you have it. I'm not pregnant and that's ok.

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.