Random Thoughts

I like that the more I cook, the better I am getting at recognizing potential problems in a recipe.  I can't recall a specific recipe that prompted this thought, but it makes me happy just the same.

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I read on a forum about a family that was having trouble with the kids complaining about the house not having any food.  The trouble was summed up very clearly when it was pointed out that there was apparently a discrepancy with the definition of food.  As far as the kids were concerned food equals something already prepared that they need to do little to nothing to in order to consume it.  In the kids eyes Mom was only buying ingredients. 

In that case, we don't really buy any food at all (except for fruits and veggies most of which require little more than a rinse in the sink).

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I love to watch my kids interact with one another.  I love that I can use them to cheer one another up or ward off a funk.  If the Storm Sprite is upset I can often encourage Little Man with little or no coaxing to come talk with her and try to cheer her up.  In fact, usually I don't need to do anything and he comes to see what's the matter of his own volition.  This can be done by him shaking his head back and forth 2 inches from hers with his nose all scrunched up and a big grin dominating his face as he says repeatedly, "Gimme those smiles! Yeah, yeah! Gimme those smiles!"  Other times he is more mild and simply pats her and reassures her that he is there, (or I am there, or Daddy is there). 

Likewise, if Little Man hasn't woken himself from his nap by 3, I know that I have a much better shot at a happy child if I bring the Storm Sprite in with me and lay her down next to him as I try and rouse him.  Instead of getting a wimpy, whiny boy, I end up with one grinning and snuggling his sister for a few minutes before he decides he is ready to get up and move on with the day.

Of course, since they are both human (and still rather small, immature ones at that) it can also be frustrating to watch their interactions.  The two of them were sitting on my lap giggling and tickling and having a grand old time.  For no apparent reason this went suddenly downhill as Little Man bit his sister's finger.  No warning.  No reason.  And that was the end of that merry scene.

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Little Man loves his daddy.  I have numerous pictures of Little Man copying, helping, or just following Hey, Babe in whatever he is doing.  One of the things that he wants to be able to do with Hey, Babe, is mow the lawn.  He has his own little plastic walk behind mower, just like his daddy does.  Unfortunately for him, we don't let him use it while Hey, Babe is actually mowing the lawn because we have too many rocks in our yard that might become accidental projectiles. 

One particular day as Little Man joined Hey, Babe putting his equipment away, he decided to help.  To do so he bent down pushed on the body of the still very hot mower and before anything could be done had burned his fingers.  Thankfully it wasn't a bad burn but still it hurt, especially for a child only beginning to expand his repertoire of painful experiences.  Since that occurrence, when we tell him not to touch something and that it is hot or dangerous he always asks, "Like a lawnmower?"  In our house it is not hot like a stove. Nope.  Around here, it's dangerous like a lawnmower.

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Excerpts from Little Man

In the course of one dinner, Little Man entertained us with the following:

"Little Man, don't forget to eat your noodles."
"I'm not allowed to."
"What? Of course you are.  Eat your noodles."
"No, I'm not, I have carrots."

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After taking another bite of carrots Little Man bursts into tears.  I assume that he has once again bit either his tongue or cheek and so I ask him if that is what happened and if he is okay.  Through his distressed tears he manages to tell me, "No! I bit my own finger!"

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Little Man has recovered from the self inflicted trauma to his finger and is now merrily eating more of his carrots when he turns to me and tells me, "I have doggies in my mouth."
Taken a little off guard I assure him that he doesn't and to finish his dinner.
"Oh, yes I do!" he contradicts, then leaning toward me with eyebrows wiggling he says conspiratorially, "and they are barking."

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excerpts from Little Man

After and long and eventful day in which Little Man took two small naps instead of his normal one long nap, he was having trouble falling asleep.  Laying in bed he pulled out the standards from his delay bedtime repertoire asking for water, asking for his blankets to be fixed, etc.  None of them were getting what he wanted, namely to have Hey, Babe sit in his room while Little Man fidgeted around pretending to go to sleep.  Finally he tried another trusty tactic, calling out that he had a boo boo.  So in went Hey, Babe to verify the claim.
"What happened?"
"I have a boo boo!"
"Where?" 
"On my head!"
"How did you get a boo boo on your head?"
"On my pillow!"
"You laid down on your pillow and it gave you a boo boo?"

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It was late morning and the Storm Sprite had announced her desire to join the rest of us poor souls in the realm of the awake, so I was off to get her from the bedroom.  While I was straightening the bed and changing the Sprite's diaper, I overheard Little Man doing something in the bathroom.
"What are you doing in there, Little Man?"
"Um, it's my pants."
"What? Your pants? Are you taking off your pants?" I started to hurry.
"Umm, I think so." 

He thinks so.  Only a two year old couldn't be certain if they were taking off their own pants. Now I'm really hurrying since it seems that I have two children nude from the waist down, and one of them is unsupervised.  As soon as I have the Storm Sprite all fastened up I grab her and head for the door so I can see what troubles Little Man is getting into in the bathroom at the end of the hall.  I see his little legs hanging off the toilet with his pants around his ankles and a huge grin on his face.

He calls down the hall to me, "Mommy, I did it! I peeing! I'm so proud of me!"

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Often while I am nursing the Storm Sprite or intend to start or perhaps have just finished, Little Man discusses with me the fact that she is a baby and so she nurses and that he was a baby and he nursed then.  This morning he was snuggled on my lap and his sister was still sleeping.  He turned to me saying, "Little Man's turn to nurse?"

While I'd rather he not start nursing again after having self weaned more than six months ago, I told him okay.  I was counting on having been told and read that most children when they get a new sibling are more concerned with being allowed to nurse then actually participating in the act.  So I tipped him back and prepared to let him nurse and he stopped me with a look of blatant horror and alarm saying, "No! I'm not a baby! That's for babies! It's the Storm Sprite's turn!"

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The Effects of Our Parenting

This morning as a I sat going through my normal routine at the computer, I came across a post that my Pastor friend Noah had written about parenting and lying.  He is addressing the effect our lack in following through on our words has regarding our children.  Specifically, when we tell them that if they don't stop such and such action, they will receive a punishment.  A punishment they never end up receiving.  He is right, this is inconsistent.  It is lying.  It is teaching our children that we do not mean what we say and they can disregard our threats, our promises, our authority.  When we do this, we are setting ourselves up to fail and struggle both now as well as later in the harder teen years.  If we can't control and guide and be affective in our parenting and discipline now with toddlers, how can we expect that they as teenagers will listen to us?  We will have taught them for years that ours is not a voice of authority.

Proverbs 22:6 says, "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."  I always believed and was taught that this meant specifically in regard to teaching them your beliefs and values from childhood so that they will still be embraced as adults.  I am now considering that it can be applied to all aspects of their lives.  It is our job to be teaching them to respect us, both as people and authority figures (and so we must act in ways that they can respect) but it is more than that.  We are also to be teaching them to be healthy individuals in all areas of their lives.  

When our kids are young we have the power to affect their current and future relationships with everything from ourselves, to exercise, food and nutrition, learning and studying, spouses, their children, themselves, etc.  We have the power to influence nearly every area in their lives.  My Mom always told us that she wanted us kids to take the best aspects of her and Dad individually, and leave their bad ones behind.  For our children to do this we actually have to give them good things to emulate.  While we cannot be perfect parents, we are human and therefore fallible, we need to have a positive influence on them much more often than not.

I often joke that as parents, Hey, Babe and I are the dictators.  If it is true it needs to be a loving dictatorship in which we try to give our children little cause to rebel or revolt, while we are still be doing our darnedest to make wise and mature decisions regarding them and our family.  I think that in many ways parenting has to be a dictatorship, especially when our kids are young, because we cannot entrust the care and decision making of our children to persons lacking in wisdom, maturity or experience (i.e. themselves).  It cannot be an anarchy, where our instructions are disregarded as meaningless.  Which is why we need to be consistent in both our words and our actions.  We need to teach them, with love and care, that ours is the last word and not a hollow chant to be ignored.  The safety and well being of our children depends on the strength and effectiveness of us as parents.   A sobering and weighty responsibility.

excerpts from Little Man

It was time to make dinner and the Little Man was all over the place, so scooping up the Storm Sprite to take her with me I asked him to clean up his blocks before dinner.  At this age when I am asking him this it is more of a distraction tactic.  He can sometimes be really good at cleaning his toys.  Sometimes.  What I really expect, especially if I am not staying to supervise, is that he will pick up a few toys and then get distracted and start playing with them.  Most of the time the few that he picked up will end up back out.  Not a very effective way to get the room cleaned up, but it does buy me some time to go to the bathroom, change the Storm Sprite's diaper or start dinner. 

With the Storm Sprite happily observing my preparations from her bouncy chair, I proceeded to pull out the random assortment of ingredients that were going to make our dinner.  The cutting board and my big knife were sitting out, ready to be used as soon as I was done washing off the vegetables.  After I turned off the water I could overhear Little Man from the family room talking to himself. 

I poked my head around the corner to better hear him and saw that he had climbed into the Storm Sprite's exersaucer and was stuck.  Which is why he was saying, "Oh no, I can't reach it.  I can't get the blocks.  Now I stuck forever." 

Excerpts from Little Man

My brother Chris was was over visiting and bemoaned how early he had gotten up and how he was tired.  Upon learning that Little Man had gotten up at the same time voluntarily and moreover does so on a regular basis, he turned to Little Man sitting next to him on the couch and told him, "You have issues."
"Yeah," Little Man agreed, then glancing down at his feet continued, "two shoes."

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Little Man was coming down the hall as Hey, Babe stood around the corner.  Thinking to scare Little Man, Hey, Babe quickly thrust the Storm Sprite out from around the corner in front of Little Man.  Without even a hint of a flinch Little Man greets his sister and keeps going.  Meanwhile the Storm Sprite is flailing, gasping, and blinking in surprise and alarm before she burst into tears.  Backfire.

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Getting up off of the floor I tell Little Man, who is still siting with his Megablocks, "I'll be right back, I have to go turn on the oven so it can preheat for dinner."  As I head for the kitchen I notice he has jumped up and is running off in the other direction.  After quickly setting the oven temperature and cracking open the kitchen window to combat the otherwise inevitable false alarm our smoke detector gives off when I cook anything at a temover 375°F, I turn back to see what trouble he ran to cause and see that he is coming back from the bathroom. 

"Did you just go turn on the bathroom fan?" I ask him, hearing it running in the distance and knowing the answer to my question.

"Yeah, Mommy's cooking, huh?"

Apparently our super sensitive smoke detectors do not speak highly of my cooking abilities.

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An Unfortunate Milestone

After a sleepless night spent constantly readjusting the Storm Sprite into positions that she could breathe and snot sucking her nose (oops sorry, did you come here for a recipe? guess you don't need one now!), today I'm beat.  Apparently in one of his unstoppable bursts of affection for his sister, Little Man shared his sniffles.  Lovely.

Sick kids are really one of the most pitiful things.  I'm typing with one hand so I can hold the Storm Sprite up on my shoulder because she still is still stuffed up.  Little Man is also down for his nap and I went in to check to see if he was still sleeping, he is.  The poor kid has the classic signs of sickness-- stuffily, snotty snores and drool emanating from his sleeping person (wait, you weren't still hoping for a recipe in this post, were you?).  As sick kids need their sleep, I have elected not to wake him and am resigned to the consequences this will produce at bedtime.

I was sitting here thinking about my two sick children, and how I'm not going to wake Little Man even though he is going on his third hour of his two-hour-only nap, and great how is he ever going to fall asleep tonight, and I had to stop and go back to the very beginning of that thought.  My two sick children.  Not my one sick child.  The Storm Sprite is here now too.  They have doubled and now outnumber me, and they both have cooties. I bet they are looking for another target, and good gracious I'm the only one available.  Kids will totally pass germs to the person that feeds them.  Help!

excerpts from Little Man

I hear the bathroom sink running and knowing that Little Man is up to no good I go and see what he is doing.  As I turn the corner I see that he is sticking his face under the faucet.

So I ask, "What are you doing?"

Little Man says, "I wanted to wash my hands."

"Then why is your face in the water."

"Yeah," is his very enlightening reply.

I feel the smile breaking through so I cover my face with the flannel I have open over my t-shirt and ask, "What do you mean, 'yeah', why is your face in the water?"

He has noticed my odd behavior and is too busy trying to cover his face with his t-shirt to answer me.  I ask him again, but by now by voice is betraying me as my face had already done. 

Little Man heard me this time but he also heard the amusement in my voice, the little booger.  Grinning up at me he says, "Yeah. My face in the water."

It's a lost cause.  My face and voice have turned against me and I can't get a grasp on the stern and put it back in them.  So I admit defeat and just tell him to get out of the bathroom and stop playing with the sink.


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I was using a set of bungee cords and had them sitting next to me.  Little Man came and hooked two ends together around his waist so that he could have a belt like his daddy.  I was only vaguely paying attention to his actions, enough to recognize that he wasn't causing trouble but not really hearing what he was saying.  When I listened a little closer I heard what he was saying, "Help me, help me, I stuck, uh, uhh, errr, help, I can't get away!" Unfortunately for him, he had leaned back against the gate and managed to somehow get one of the hooks stuck to it, effectively trapping himself.

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Yesterday while I was over at Mom's house I had her cut my hair very short for me.  I had about 10-12 inches chopped off, leaving me with hair about 1 to 1 1/2 inches long.  Quite a drastic change.  Ever since this happened, Little Man has been repeatedly asking, "Where'd Mommy's hair go?" and then answering himself, "Grandma did it! It's all gone!"
(I get a kick out of him blaming Grandma)

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excerpts from Little Man

We are at dinner and Little Man is sitting, or rather, wriggling in his chair (he is never still) and tucking into his Pumpkin Black Bean Soup.  At first he is just eating and talking to us.  As Hey, Babe and I get into a conversation we notice that Little Man is now talking to himself.  Which in itself is not unusual.  It is what he is saying and doing that is rather odd.  As he scoops up a new bite he starts saying through tightly pursed lips, "Open the door! Open the door!" and pressing the spoon against his not opening mouth.  He says it a few more times before he lets the bite in and then starts the whole thing again.
(We have never done anything remotely like this to him and are clueless as to where it came from.)

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As I was changing Little Man-
Momma: I need to put some cream on your bottom, you look a little pink and I don't want you to get a sore bottom.
Little Man (solemnly): Like a dinosaur bottom.

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As we are praying, Hey, Babe enters the room and steps up onto the bouncer.  Little Man stops his prayer and, turning to Hey, Babe, says, "No Bouncing!" and then immediately resumes his reverent posture with his hands clasped, eyes closed, and face gently upturned.

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When Toddlers Share

The other day I was sitting at the dining room table with Little Man, waiting (perhaps a tad impatiently) for him to finish his goldfish crackers so we could move on to the next thing.  The Storm Sprite was sleeping and I wanted to get the laundry folded before she woke up.  Some may wonder why I didn't just bring the laundry in and fold it while he was eating, or leave him to finish his crackers while I went to fold in the other room.  I have very good reasons for not doing either. 

The first option would result in him wanting to "help" fold the laundry.  This would mean that either I would get cracker crumbs all over my freshly laundered clothes, or I would have a boy in tears because I wouldn't allow him to help.  The second option would result in Little Man becoming lonely and bored in the dining room while I was somewhere else.  First he would start to play with his crackers, crushing a few, perhaps dropping some accidentally on the floor (or intentionally throwing them there), and would end with him pouring his water into the cracker bowl.  Perhaps he would then smoosh them up a bit, or perhaps he would just manage to spill it all over himself and the floor.  At this point he would come to find me (leaving behind him a trail of crumbs like Hansel and Gretel) and see that I was folding laundry. Here I refer you back to option one's outcome. 

None of those result sound particularly appealing, especially considering it would mean tears and more laundry.  And so I was sitting at the table. Waiting.  But not eating.  Little Man noticed my lack of snack and slid his bowl over to me saying, "Share with Mommy?" I wasn't really hungry, but I was pleased that he was being so considerate and initiating on his own sharing with someone else. So I made a big deal of thanking him for sharing and took a goldfish cracker.  After I had popped the cracker into my mouth and ate it, Little Man turned his big beautiful blue eyes on me and mournfully asked, "Where'd my cracker go? Mommy ATE it!" And proceeded to cry. 

Sometimes you just can't win, so you'd better learn to laugh.

Little Man-2, Electronics/Mommy-1

When I first started perusing food blogs looking for recipes I would bookmark the pages I was interested in.  The ultimate plan was to add the recipes into the document I was compiling on my computer of all my recipes.  It quickly became clear that having all of my recipes in a word document was unrealistic, especially since I like to browse recipes by photo. All those photos made it slow to load and the document became unwieldy.  I searched for and found a recipe program, BigOven, that was able to do everything I wanted it to and more.  I could add a photo right next to a recipe! I could even rate recipes, make notes, easily it scale up or down, search by ingredient, or word, or tag.  It was wonderful.  But most importantly, it had photos with the recipes.  I was set!  Until along came Little Man.

I don't know how kids do it.  I am sure that anyone who has any experience at all with kids knows that electronics and kids do not go well together.  One evening I walked away from the computer and into the kitchen with my BigOven program up and running.  At the time Little Man couldn't climb up onto the computer chair (the wheels confounded him) and so to make the computer safe while it was running, we had taken to placing the keyboard and mouse on top of the monitor if we needed to walk away for a few minutes.  But I forgot.  I heard him clicking and tapping away from the next room and I hurried in, wondering how much damage he had done to the current recipe and reassuring myself that I would be able to remember most of the ingredient measurements and if not then I could surely find it again online.  I checked and the recipe was still there in its entirety.  Whew! Safe! He must not have caused any trouble.

Then I noticed there was no photo next to the recipe.  Odd.  But easy to remedy.  I wouldn't even need the exact photo that had been there before as long as I found one that showed the dish.  It wasn't until a little while later that I realized the extent of what he had done.  He had somehow managed with just a few clicks and taps at the computer to delete over 1,300 pictures!  It took me weeks to sort through the hidden archives on my computer and manually paste each one back into the correct recipe.  (This was when I discovered BigOven's very important "backup" feature).  Somehow, not all of the photos were anywhere to be found on my computer and I ended up searching for each of the several hundred remaining recipes online for an appropriate photo.  The whole process took much longer than I care to remember.  Weeks.  But I eventually got a photo for each recipe.  This was important to me, how can I search for things that look appealing if there are no pictures?

Little Man must have inherited my desire for photos because he LOVES looking at pictures.  He always wants to be on the wrong end of the camera when I am trying to take his picture because he wants to see!  I came across an inexpensive little key chain digital photo frame and thought that since it was meant to be tossed into purses and pockets along with bunches of keys, it just might stand up to Little Man for a while.  The other day we needed to travel an hour and a half to a family birthday celebration and I thought that it would be the perfect thing to bring in the car to distract/entertain him.  We were traveling along for a little while before he started getting antsy. So I handed him back his photo frame, full of pictures that I had loaded on for him.  Not even half a minute later he was asking me where the pictures went.  He had managed in less than 30 seconds to delete the whole album.  It would have taken me or Hey, Babe a heck of a lot longer to intentionally figure out what he had done.

Tonight I came into the room to find Little Man holding my cell phone and pressing buttons.  Curious who he may have accidentally called I took it from him to check.  What was the option showing on the screen?
    Delete All Contacts? 
I finally got between him and destruction in the nick of time.  Kids sure have a way with technology, don't they?