Cookie Montser

So, it turns out that Eleri has a bit of a sweet tooth. As these things go, we were really careful about giving Clio sugar from an early age, but as a second child, Eleri was introduced far sooner and has had the pleasure far more often. Clio has recently campaigned for regular desserts in our household, yet she is a child who can push away a half eaten bowl of ice cream and declare herself done. Eleri, on the other hand, will polish her own serving off in about one big inhale, then sign for "more" while she's still got a mouthful. In fact, the other day we had Thin Mints for dessert (an enterprising young Girl Scout had set up a cookie booth outside our local Safeway), and when Eleri saw me hand a second one to Clio, she quickly shoved her entire cookie in her mouth in order to ask for more.

And oh, did she enjoy it.

Silhouettes

After meaning to do it for a very long time, I finally made these silhouettes of the girls:


Actually, first I made these silhouette's of Lizzie's kids, Laila and Owen, and then I made the ones of the girls.


When they were finished, and I was admiring my handiwork, I noticed something weird:to me, Laila and Owen looked much more like Laila and Owen when rendered in silhouette than my kids looked like themselves. Feeling curious about this, I wandered on over to Wikipedia, where I learned that a recent study at Stanford showed that, while most facial-recognition tests have been based on frontal images, people can actually identify gender and age just from a silhouette; that silhouettes are the "most immediately recognizable and indentifiable shape of the character." And I wonder if, in a way, we know our own children too well to recognize them easily, if they are too big, too complicated, too blurry around the edges for us to see them objectively, flattened out in black cardstock. I think I know Laila and Owen just enough to see in their silhouettes trademark markers, like Laila's bob and forehead wispies, as well as to imbue the small details with the sense of personality that I have pieced together through our visits and their mom's blog (from where I filched the photographes as source material).

Perhaps in support of my theory, Dave and I both recognized Eleri much more clearly in her portrait; I wonder if this is because we have not known her as long as Clio. Even now, neither of us feel that I truly captured Clio here: maybe because a serious Clio is simply not the Clio we known, and I did ask her to pose to capture a silhouette on film to have something to work from.


I hung my new artwork in our bedroom, which I think is funny because of the bird silhouettes on our bedding, but because of the placement by my side of the bed, I have noticed something else: out of the corner of my eye, Clio's profile may not capture her Clio-ness, but she sure looks, to me, an awful lot like me. And I find myself awed by the way a simple card stock cutout can both capture so much of a person's essence, while also reflecting a family lineage.

I should mention that, if you'd like to make these yourself, you can find the instructions here, on the wonderful blog design*sponge.

Or, if you want me to make one for you, go ahead and send me a profile picture (or, ideally, several) of the subject, and give me a color choice and style (traditional, feminine, modern) for the background, and I'll happily get to work.

Dinner Tonight

We make just about every meal around here, including packing lunches for all four of us. This requires weekly meal planning and grocery shopping and a little ingenuity about weeknight dinners. While we do have a bunch of standbys, we average about 2 new recipes per week, many of which hail from Cooking Light magazine. I like this magazine not so much for the "light" (in fact, we often use real eggs when eggbeaters are called for and Dave never measures the oil according to their standards), but because it offers healthful meals that are easy to make, and has a host of special columns targeting a number of common cooking problems: Dinner Tonight and Superfast for when time is scarce, Budget Cooking for when money is scarce, Inspired Vegeterian for when meat is scarce, and the Enlightened Chef for global cuisine, among others. In addition, they have "cooking class" which covers basic (and not so basic) cooking techniques, and offers recipes to test them out. The magazine also recently got a facelift, with a new editor in chief and new design, and it seems to have stepped just a step or two forward into today.

I pulled about half of the recipes out of the most recent issue, and actually chose four of them to test out this week. Monday we had Roast leg of lamb with chili-garlic sauce and tonight we had Lentil-Barley burgers with Fiery Fruit Salsa: basically homemade veggie burgers. I like to experiment with this kind of recipe because they are scalable for the kids: while the salsa (and the lamb's sauce) had a bit too much heat for the girls, they ate the burgers (and the lamb) with ketchup and enjoyed the leftover mango and pineapple on the side. Here's how it turned out for the grown-ups:


I have to say, the combination of cumin in the patties with the tropical, slightly Mexican salsa (from the serranos and the tomatillos) was really quite delicious. These burgers were not, in the end, the most practical for a weeknight, and they happened in stages, with Dave cooking the lentil and barley and sauteeing things and food processing it all a couple night ago, and just cooking up the patties tonight, so I'm not sure they'll go into the regular repertoire. For vegeterians though, or anyone who loves veggie burgers, I would triple the recipe and freeze a bunch of patties for a rainy day.

Monkey see, monkey do

You know that classic book Caps For Sale? Just in case, I'll recap (if you're old enough to read this, reading this should not spoil the book for you). So, there's this peddler peddling caps. No one's buying, so he doesn't have money for lunch. Instead, he heads out of town and settles down by a tree, with all of his hats stacked up on his head. He falls asleep. When he wakes up, the caps are gone- gone! He looks all around, but no hats. Eventually he looks up, where he discovers a bunch of monkeys in the tree, each holding one of his caps. This is where it gets really good, if you're 3 or so. The peddler is steaming mad, and he shakes his fists at the monkeys, demanding that they return his hats, but they just shake their fists back. Then he shakes both fists, then his leg, etc. etc. and the monkeys just mimic him, until finally, in exasperation, the peddler throws his own cap on the ground. Guess what? So do the monkeys, and all of the caps come raining down from the tree.

Why do I bring this up? Because Eleri is like one of those monkeys, blindly copying the big kids. The other night, when Dakota and family were over for dinner, Dakota and Clio came running out of the girls' room with soft blocks in their mouths. Why? who knows! But right after them, Eleri came running, a block in her mouth too, ever the game second child. It's like the way she chases them and says "guys!": she doesn't know what the game is, but she knows she's in.

Tonight, we heard her wail from Dakota's room, and I went running. Clio and Dakota were standing there with spatulas, and, looking at my red-faced baby, asked what in the world had happened. Clio told me that Dakota was "beating her on the head" and when I asked if this was true, Dakota smiled a big goofy smile and said that it was. Not long after, with Eleri fully recovered, after Dakota had apologized and insisted that he and Clio were in on it together, Eleri was eyeing the spatulas and I asked Clio to give her one. Eleri walked right over and smacked Dakota on the head, then turned around and smiled. She may not have gotten the joke, but lord, did she think herself funny.

The "Only Child" Advantage?

Clio and I had a date in Denver today. We went to my office for the morning and she watched videos and made watercolors while I got some things done. Then we headed out to lunch at Pete's Kitchen, a greasy spoon with Greek influences that has been "A Denver Institution since 1942," and headed on to the free day at the zoo. It was lovely. It was nice to focus on just one child for once, rather than wearing myself out just trying to keep tabs on two, as I did yesterday at the WOW Childrens museum in Lafayette. It was a pleasure to have a conversation with Clio over chicken fingers and fries, to actually listen to the zillions of questions she asks and do my best to answer them thoughtfully. It was fun to be out together, a dynamic duo. And I started to glimpse the reasoning of parents who choose to have just one child. It seemed so much simpler, so much more directed. I've always thought that a strange dynamic arises when there is just one child and two parents: it seems to me that the balance is out of whack, and the child becomes a third in the adult relationship in the house, rather than dwelling, with siblings, in the realm of children. But today, with Clio seeming very grown up as she chattered on about the drawings she made for my co-workers and the animals she most wanted to see at the zoo, I could see it from the other side, and see the pleasure one might find in a sole child who was necessarily adult.

None of this is to say that I would liket o have just one child; I hope it is obvious that I adore BOTH of my girls and can not imagine life one Peterson short. I just had a brief window into what it might be like, and I feel, for the first time, like I kinda sorta get it.

And if there is ever any doubt, there are moments like this one:

Tonight, Clio was peddling imaginary ice cream cones. After handing one to me, she asked Eleri if she would like one, and Eleri nodded. When Clio lobbed the pretend ice cream into the air, Eleri simply opened her mouth and "caught it" with a big 'um! without missing a beat, she then made the sign for more.

I'm not sure I could have played along like that, even if I was fully focused on Clio, and I know both Eleri and Clio are the better for having the other around.

Family Movie

When we made the move from Brooklyn to Boulder, we made the decision to leave our TV behind. Dave was convinced that we were wasting too much time watching programs we didn't actually care about, just because it was there. And you know what? He was so right. Now, I feel like I actually have time to read and clean and make stuff. The only thing I miss? Watching movies. Or more specifically, watching movies with other people: I can (and do) watch rentals on our portable DVD player, curled up in bed or on the couch. On Valentine's day evening, I thought it would be nice to watch a movie with my husband, but neither of us thought that huddling around a 9 inch screen would be particularly romantic. Likewise, my big plan for a "family movie," Finding Nemo with the girls.


In addition to the fact that this was comfortable for no one, there is the added problem of Eleri. Eleri likes to push buttons. She likes to open and close things. So trying to watch a movie with her on a device she can reach is impossible. She pauses and plays and rewinds and fast forwards. She closes the whole darn thing. Clio, in particular, finds this to be very annoying. I thought it was less annoying that when Eleri sat on my neck in an attempt to get a better look.


Now I wonder if we should get one of those flatscreen TVs with a DVD slot right in the side, store it in a closet (as our neighbors do), and just hang it on a wall when we want to watch.

Product Endorsement: Parents table-top easel

We've been encouraging Eleri to find her inner artist for many, many months now, but no matter what medium we offer her, most of the "art" happens on and around her mouth, when she tries to eat the paint, or markers, or crayons, or play doh. Or stickers, glitter, feathers, ribbons, stamps, stamp pad, scissors, glue stick or glue. So I was thrilled when, in desperation or inspiration, depending on how you see that glass go halvsies, I set this table top easel in front of her, and.... she drew. On the surface designed for drawing and only there.



My parents got the girls this kit for Christmas, and it's just now coming into its own. I have no idea what particular quality dissuaded Eleri from eating the supplies- the fact that it's upright, the nice well in the middle for putting supplies into and out of, or the two-sidedness (one whiteboard one chalkboard) all of which make the whole thing fun in itself, as an object.

I don't know, and I don't care: I'm thrilled that we have found something with which Eleri will sit still for an extended period of time, allowing her parents a little break to, oh, I don't know, pick the individual grains of rice out of the dining room rug, from lunch, when Eleri flung her entire plate off the table while attempting to perform that whole pull-the-tablecloth-out-from-under you trick.

Also, the easel comes with plastic, magnetic shapes, for sticking, stacking, and tracing.

Oh, and peek-a-booing, eating, and throwing on the floor.




At least these pieces are big enough, and colorful enough, to make clean up a snap. Or, at least, not entirely terrible.