Buying Time To Make Dinner

Here's Clara, who, in her own words, is "busy doing my work." Amazing how a little piece of antiquated office machinery can occupy a little person long enough for Mama to get dinner made. :) She is pretty crazy about the typewriter. Not bad for alphabet exposure, either.

Tonight's dinner was completed courtesy of these sparkly pompons, purchased from the $1 bins at Target today. They were irresistable, looked very shimmery in their stainless steel cups and proved to be an excellent activity for color sorting. Clara was TOTALLY into it, and needed very little instruction about how to sort. I basically set out the tray with some little cups on it, dumped out the pompons, put two blue in one cup and two yellow in another and off she went. It was great for self-checking, too. If she put a green one in the blue cup, for example, she'd say, "Uh, oh, Mama, look, I'll show you! Something's wrong with this one!" Then she'd take out the green ball and correct herself, placing it in the cup with the green balls. When she'd sorted them all she dumped them right back out and started over, then spent time pouring the contents of one full cup into an empty one and back again. She was fun to watch.

I also tried a new recipe today, the Peanut Butter and Jelly Power Muffins from Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children. They're kind of ugly. I haven't been trying out enough new things now that toddler teas are on hiatus for a little while (hard to schedule with people on vacation and our never-ending and hard-to-predict doctor's appointments). I needed a little snack to keep in the freezer and to throw into our lunch bag for outings. It was rather discouraging when she took one look at the muffin on her plate, said, "It has jam on it," and pushed it away. What kid doesn't eat jam? Clara, apparently. She'd only eat the non-jam-contaminated bites. Interesting note, the batch I made with Aunt Linda's yummy homemade blackberry jam looked neat as a pin and came out like a dream, while the muffins made with a store-bought whole-fruit jam were disgusting-looking with the jam running all over (and they were hard to extract from the pan). The muffins have mashed banana, whole-wheat flour, peanut butter, raisins, and rolled oats (among other things) and are sweetened with maple syrup and a little sugar (supposedly maple, I had to use brown). I liked the 12-grain muffins in the book better, and it looks like Clara did, too! We'll try some out on Sophia tomorrow and see how they go.