1 more thing to be thankful for

Cakewrecks

Click the links and just try not to laugh so hard your spiced apple cider shoots out your nose.

Horns of plenty.... of tears of laughter.

These fowl are foul enough to make a vegetarian gag, but I don't know that I'd want any of these even if I did eat meat!

3 Things I am Thankful For

1. SchmoopyBoy singing. A couple of his favorites are Happy Birthday to You and the Preschool Musical Song from Sesame Street. He doesn't have all the lyrics down flawlessly and his pitch indicates he has similar singing talent as his parents (poor kid), but truly a joy to behold and puts a smile on my face.

2. Random acts of niceness from my husband. I came downstairs last night after putting SchmoopyBoy to bed and discovered a gift bag sitting on the stove. In it was a cookbook I’ve been oogling for almost a year. Early holiday gift.

3. Healing through writing. It’s been a rough year. Writing on this blog and spilling my guts from time to time has been my therapy. I am privileged to have this outlet. I am privileged to have the opportunity to share my stories and find community through it.

Happy Thanksgiving Everybody!

Bento Lunches for a Picky Vegetarian Toddler

SchmoopyBoy's playschool recently transitioned from a peanut-free facility to a nut-free facility. I initially went into a semi-panic. Almond butter and jelly sandwiches and macaroni and cashew-cheese were some of the few lunch entrees he would actually eat on a regular basis. Oh no! What on earth would I replace them with?! What could I put in my picky little guy's lunches that he would actually eat?

We have tried sunflower butter and jelly sandwiches. He is highly unimpressed with sunflower butter. Quite frankly, so am I. It is very bitter. Plain sunflower seeds, on the other hand, are a success. Go figure. So sunflower seeds it is.



Noodles are always a hit, so he gets pasta probably close to twice a week. Bonus, the year long dairy-strike that SchmoopyBoy was on appears to have come to an end. So I've been able to add cheese to his lunches for about a month now. A small bowl of shredded cheese added to the pasta lunches below is almost always a successful addition (it must be a separate bowl because goodness knows the cheese must not touch the noodles).

Here are a couple pasta lunches that came home almost completely empty (cheese bowl not photographed). Plain noodles (they must be plain, SchmoopyBoy does not do "goopies") with seasonal fruit - pomagranate seeds and pears in the top picture, apple in the bottom picture, and some combination of the only vegetables he will eat on a semi-regular basis - carrots, peas, and cucumber.




My bento lunches for SchmoopyBoy are hardly the creative and cute creations you can find on more advanced bento sites. I had lofty intentions of putting together beautiful and creative lunches that would awe and impress, but given the amount of time I have to throw something together each day, I'm pretty proud that I manage to throw together something other than lunchables!

What's been going on this past week?

For starters, I've been sick. Laid up on my back for a couple of days. It was amazingly awesome to take 4-hour naps two days in a row late last week. No worries about getting “too much sleep” here - now that I am better my usual insomnia over the past 2 nights has rendered me as sleep deprived and semi-functional as ever. Oh, the joy of insomnia.

What else is going on? Let’s see. About a month ago I had enough blood drawn to feed a small family of vampires to see if any reason could be determined for the miscarriages I’ve experienced this year. As my doctor suspected, everything came back normal. Which leaves modern western medicine to say, “There doesn’t appear to be anything we can do to help you. Better luck next time.”

Which leaves me to say, “To heck with modern western medicine, what else can I investigate?”

So now I am currently undergoing a series of rolfing sessions on my internal organs to make sure that everything is structurally aligned properly. Apparently, structural tilts and improper alignments of the uterus and nearby organs can impact whether or not a uterus can carry a baby to term, or so it is hypothesized in rolfing circles. During the past two sessions, I discovered:

1) I have a large liver. It was stuck to my large intestine, but is now free and “happy” to move around at will.
2) My entire reproductive system was pulling towards the left hand side of my body, but is now straightened out.

Do I sound like some kind of hippy, alternative medicine nut? I ask because I kind of feel like one while writing this.

When I grow up I want to be Nora Ephron’s mother

Heard today on NPR’s Morning Edition, an interview with Nora Ephron:

“…my mother sa[id], 'Everything is copy; everything is material; someday you will think this is funny.' My parents never said, 'Oh you poor thing.' It was work through it, get to the other side, turn it into something.”

Furthermore,

"My mother [taught] me a very fundamental lesson of humor, which is that if you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you, but if you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your joke. And you're the hero of the joke because you're telling the story."

This is advice I am going to keep in my hip pocket. I have the feeling I might need it with SchmoopyBoy one day.

You can read or listen to entire interview from this link.

Last Weekend at the Pumpkin Patch

Last week I took SchmoopyBoy to the "Farm House!" to see the pumpkin patch and the animals. He had a blast. Loved Loved Loved the animals.

How old does this kid look? Two and a half? I think not.

He got to feed a pig a carrot.

OMG a horsie!!

The horsie ride was the highlight of the morning.


Although, riding the mechanical cow was pretty fun too. He got to see a couple of real cows as well as a llama on the hay ride. No pictures of the hay ride unfortunately.

Election Day Link

I don't have time to write anything coherent for election day today, so go over to Mom-101 and read her election day post.