I overheard my oldest say to my youngest the other day, “OK, which do you want? Endangered species or extinct ones?”

In our house, that means that spice cookies are in the offing.

My mother-in-law had bought cookie cutters for my offspring when they were youngsters, and they have become treasures in the Thing Drawer ever since. The eventual choice was chocolate and vanilla bison cookies; they put away the dinos, the auk and the timber wolf cutters for a later day.

Unlike myself, my children have a baking grandmother. My own grandmother was a terrible cook and I don’t believe she ever baked anything.

My mother-in-law, on the other hand, is not a particularly good or imaginative cook, but she’s a wonderful baker and has the energy still to turn out her legendary pies and cookies. Every holiday, we get a box of pressed cookies in traditional shapes that we wait for impatiently and eat immediately.

Both my girls know how to make these cookies now. My mother-in-law has worked with the girls in her kitchen for years and passed on her love of baking to them.

I’ve always felt that those kinds of memories are the true legacies we pass on from one generation to another: the family recipe, the special cookie cutter, the smell of spice cookies. Ah!

Dear parents with toddlers:

Do you ever wonder if you are giving your child the right foods and the right amount? I do.

I have been known to fret over whether a  490-calorie broccoli quiche is too much for my 18-month-old daughter to handle in one sitting or if she’s had one too many animal crackers as a snack or if it’s OK to let her eat a soy chocolate popsicle (sounds healthier than just a plain chocolate popsicle, right?) Her water intake—she could probably chug an entire bottle if I let her—even gives me pause.

I found this quiz online that tests how well you know your toddler’s nutrition needs. Check it out here and then  check out “rate your baby’s plate” here to see if he or she is getting enough nutrition.

Photo (not of my daughter) courtesy of TJN.

(We interrupt your regularly scheduled kid nutrition blog to bring you some mommy nutrition.)

I’ve been remiss in posting recently—mostly due to a crazy work schedule and taking a class for my master’s degree that involves a ton reading and writing. In addition to reading a novel a week, we are responsible for a chapter a week from the textbook, and my first paper is due Thursday on gender issues in Jane Eyre. It would help if I would finish the book.

Anyway, all this angst has driven me back to a nasty soda habit. I’ve always had a weakness for the carbonated stuff—Dr Pepper is my all-time favorite. A few years ago, on Weight Watchers, I managed to wean myself off the high-test stuff only to end up with a Diet Coke habit, which is going strong again.

Sitting on the sofa Sunday watching football & popping open a soda, (yes, I know I should have been working on the paper instead) I started to think about my downward slide. Besides my hectic schedule and the lack of sleep that comes from having a little one in the house, I think a lot of my lack of energy has to do with my soda habit.

So, watch out co-workers, I’m dumping out the rest of the can on my desk & heading to the water cooler for my liquid refreshment. I’ll probably be crabby for a couple of days with caffeine withdrawal, but it’s for the best. Now I just need to stock up on seltzer and fresh lemons, my standard kicking-the-soda-habit alternative.

Photo by Matthew Brown/The Journal News

My husband and oldest went out on Saturday ostensibly to go picking something. I never actually knew whether it was apples,  peaches or pumpkins, which is fine since they didn’t come home with them. It was a nice bonding time between father and daughter and the day was lovely, so they enjoyed the drive.

When they came home, however, they were carrying a small plastic bag and a white bakery box. The box contained a peach pie they picked up at the place where we usually buy pumpkins and apples every fall.

The plastic bag, however, was more interesting from my point of view. It contained one carrot with top and dirt, one tiny purple pepper, a tomato, a large zuchini and a tiny tree of broccoli.

Since it’s still a little warm to make vegetable soup, I wasn’t sure what to do with the selection. What do you do with a single carrot and a purple pepper?

Apparently the pick-your-own farm they found was just like a very large garden, and my oldest happily went up and down the rows sampling this and that.

It called to mind her grandparents, she said. They always had a large garden and they’ve let my children pick fresh vegetables for years. There’s nothing quite like pulling a carrot from the ground or taking a knife and cutting off a piece of broccoli still on the stalk.

So while the harvest season is upon us, I’d recommend taking your children of any age to a pick-your-own farm and let them see where food comes from. It might be a revelation.

My enduring love of reality TV is not something I’m particularly proud of, but I always find in between all the horrifying preening and only-in-America emotive TMI, there is something useful, OK maybe just interesting, to take away.

Consider Tim Gunn of Project Runway. Have you ever encountered a sweeter, more calming figure? Watching him, hand resting thoughtfully on chin, gently encouraging an overwrought designer to “be your own editor” is like chamomile tea through the tube for me. 

And sometimes reality TV is great for reminding you of just how easy your life is compared to some. Jon and Kate Plus 8 falls squarely in that camp.

I’m sure you’ve  heard the story. This Pennsylvania couple has twins, then tries to get pregnant again and ends up with sextuplets. It’s insanity times 8. 

But what I love is how it makes three kids under 7 — which is what we have — seems so easy, so quiet, so calm. 

I’m also struck at how much the kids love, love, love having days alone with Mom and Dad. They simply can’t stop smiling. Jon and Kate allow them to choose whatever itinerary they’d most enjoy and they head off together, a blissful and rare outing as a family triumvirate.

A huge chocolate milkshake with lunch? Perfect. Ear piercing for one of the older girls? No problem.

It’s easy to forget amid all our day-to-day stresses how infectiously joyful the sight of happy kids can be. 

With that playing in the back of my mind, I decided to, at least for now, try the more challenging kid-cooking projects just one-on-one. I love to cook with my kids, but sometimes having to mind three pairs of hands and a bag of flour amid cries of “but her measuring cup is bigger!” is just too much drama for this mama.

So the other day, while the oldest was in school and the baby was napping (I wasn’t playing hooky, I promise — I work weekends so I have time off during the week), me and my almost-5-year-old tackled her most ambitious project to date — homemade meatballs and sauce. She did great! So careful mixing together the meat, the bread crumbs, the parsley and onion, expertly rolling it into little balls. We had a blast.

I actually got a bit emotional. I can only describe the sensation as a little catch in the heart when you realize you are doing something that women for centuries before you have done and also derived enormous comfort from, that place in time where domesticity feels nothing like drudgery. When the act of creating or giving sustenance feels like opening a gift and it cost you nothing.

I used to feel that way when they were babies, nursing them in the middle of the night, alone in a quiet living room, the TV on mute, throwing off just enough blue glow to light our way back to the crib. That’s not to say there weren’t blazing moments of impatience at the baby who wouldn’t nap more than 15 minutes at a time or those days when you believed in the core of your being that you were the only woman on Earth who couldn’t do this parenting thing right. There were just moments when I got it. When I realized this time was as powerful as it was fleeting and it needed to be recognized.

So there we were. A mother in a quiet kitchen on a cloudless late summer afternoon teaching her little girl how to cook, laughing at messy hands, wiping onion tears away with a little kiss.

When Rafael was still a toddler, we didn’t make him sit with us at the dinner table through every meal. The adults in this house would sit and talk and argue and often discussions reach high decibels, depending on who was around for dinner.

We lived with my mother-in-law and, for a while, my brother-in-law as well. Sometimes my father-in-law dropped by. And when my family was in town, that just added to the mix.

Not angry arguments or anything, just one of those families where discussions get loud and, frankly, humorous. But kind of boring for the little kiddies, for the most part.

So if Rafael wanted to wander away and play or even watch a little show on Noggin, we were OK with that. In fact, it often was easier to get through a meal if he weren’t at the table, as he’d usually eat before I got home from work, and so wouldn’t be hungry any longer.

We’d struggled with keeping him at the table until common sense, advice from others and, yes, those ubiquitous advice columns in parenting magazines made us realize we were fighting against the tide and it wouldn’t scar him for life.

But now that he’s a bit older and Markus is still in the high chair (not that that’s going to last much longer), we’ve reset the rules.

He can eat a little snack in front of the tv; some Goldfish crackers and milk, perhaps, but all meals are at the table, with the whole family.

But now it’s just the four of us in the house most of the time. My mother-in-law is in the midst of moving to the mountains; my brother-in-law has his own place again.

So, we eat breakfast together at the dining room table. Daddy eats lunch with the little guys. When Mommy gets home from work, we all sit down in the dining room together. Even if Rafael and Markus only eat a snack because they’ve already eaten dinner before I got home, they’re still at the table, eating with us.

We discuss the day, what happened at school. Anything exciting that happened at work. What Markus and Daddy did while Rafael was in school.

It’s a boisterous affair, and fun. And Rafael loves to help clear the table (I’m sure that won’t last many years), so the family time extends even past the meal itself.

I thought this day would never come – my two-year-old leaning from his high chair with arms outstretched, pleading “boccoli, boccoli” as I walked to the dinner table with a plate of steaming asparagus.
Now, I don’t fuss over details. The idea is that Aristu is enthusiastic about vegetables, may it be broccoli, asparagus or green beans, is good news. That’s a big change from a few months ago when he would spit out anything that had vegetables in it, even though I tried to hide it in all kinds of food.
Now, he’ll eat as many florets of broccoli as I give him — OK, I’m pushing it; let’s say three or four — though he doesn’t eat the stem. But we’ll get there at some point. The other day he examined a string bean for a few seconds before tentatively putting it in his mouth.
What does bother me, though, is that he seems to like his vegetables after giving them a bath. We usually give him a plastic cup with a little bit of water because he seems to want to graduate from his sippy cup. These days he likes to slip the broccoli/beans/asparagus into the cup, swirl it around, take it out dripping, suck on it and then chew it. The other day he gave the same treatment to a chicken nugget. As my husband and I and our oldest – he’s 12 – gagged with disgust, Aristu wasn’t bothered at all. He sucked on the chicken nugget and then wolfed it down.
I don’t like the idea of his playing with food while eating dinner. I know that at day care he sits before a television while his teacher feeds him. I disapprove of that, but I don’t insist she stop doing that because, otherwise, it would take her forever to feed him. I know, it takes him 45 minutes to eat when he’s home.
But I’m going to let him play with his food as long as he eats it at the end. If you’re the parent of a fussy eater, you’ll understand. It doesn’t matter how he eats it, as long as he eats it. Right?

It seems as though the freaky weather we’ve been having—hot and humid Sunday to breezy and cool on Monday—has given my little girl a cold—not her first but shaping up to be her worst. The illness is compounded by the fact that she has a cut on her upper lip after she hit it on the table so trying to clean a runny nose has been…well let’s just say, a challenge.

She’s a healthy eater but doesn’t appear to want anything besides her milk. Now I’ve heard that milk produces more mucus, but not sure of the veracity of that. She also had a low-grade fever last night…and I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying, “feed a cold, starve a fever.”

Last night, we tried chicken soup but that ended up more on her clothes than in her mouth. I’m really looking for food that would clear her passageways…if there is such a thing. Wasabi for toddlers, anyone.

I read that popsicles might be a good alternative. Anyone have any remedies/recipes they can recommend for a little stuffy nose.

Like many another adult, I was cooking long before I had kids.

And like many another adult, my cooking habits were formed in part from working with my own mother in the kitchen and in part from experiments on my own.

So I wasn’t all that interested to hear that my youngest was unhappy with my potato/carrot peeler after a semester in middle school. Recalling my own middle school home ec experiences, I knew that the disconnect between what the teacher wants and what reality dictates can be very wide indeed.

I held out for a while, but eventually purchased the potato peeler my youngest demanded. After all, she said, it was a great peeler and she was having to do the peeling anyway. Why not use the one she wanted?

To my great surprise, the peeler really was better than the older ones I used that looked just like the ones my mother used. Live and learn, I guess.

Two years ago, my youngest, again relying on that middle school home and careers cooking course, insisted we needed a cookie scoop. For those who aren’t blessed with a middle schooler, a cookie scoop is like a very small-headed mechanical ice cream scoop.

I didn’t see the purpose, since a table spoon and butter knife or bowl scraper works just fine, but for the holidays I ordered one from a catalogue for a gag gift. They may be available in stores, but I couldn’t find them.

The thing’s a marvel and I had to admit, once again, that my daughter was right.

The scoop broke last weekend during a particularly hard batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, apparently. I wasn’t there. I probably would have suggested they add another egg to the mix or some milk to loosen up the batter a bit. Now I’m looking for a replacement and trying to avoid my youngest’s grin, since she’s now two for two.

My only consolation is wondering what my youngest’s children will insist she change in her kitchen that she’ll have to admit is better than she thought.

Sorry I’ve been so lax in blogging lately, but it’s been a pretty busy time in my house.A week and a half ago, my oldest, Rafael, started attending pre-kindergarten.

We’re very fortunate in that our school district in New Jersey has universal pre-K. He could have started when he was 3, but we decided to wait until this year, after he turned 4.

My husband is a stay-at-home dad, so it didn’t seem to make sense to put him in a full-day program, five days a week just yet. Especially when it meant that our schedules for vacations and the like would become locked into a strict pattern once he started school.

But I digress.

The district provides free breakfast and a very inexpensive lunch. But Rafael, as I believe I’ve mentioned in the past, can be rather picky at times. So he eats his breakfast of “Uncle Andy’s Cereal” (known to the world at large as Honey Bunches of Oats) — “in a bowl like you used to have, Mommy, with a long silver spoon and no raisins, just milk” — and for the first couple of days we packed two or three packages of those cheese cracker sandwiches with peanut butter, a couple of juice boxes and a plastic container with Goldfish crackers.

In, of course, his old-style metal Spider-Man lunchbox. Read more of this entry »