Occupying Toddlers While Cooking

This is why toddlers need something to do while I slave away in the kitchen:

 

 

I don’t write very much about my children, mainly because I write as a release from what I do for twelve hours out of the day, but it seems germane to a discussion of healthy cooking to hash out what to do with the little ones while preparing those healthy meals.  Ideally they would just play quietly amongst themselves while I tie on an apron and get down with my bad June Cleaver self, but those of you with kids know how unlikely that would be!

 

So here is a list of things that work for us – each one doesn’t work every time, but I just cycle through this stuff until something does.

 

-         Peeling garlic.  My daughter (3 years old) is a pro.  I usually have to start it for her, but she loves helping Mom with one of the base ingredients of just about every meal.

 

-         Sifting and mixing.  I doubt this idea is new to anyone, but it usually works well for us.  If you’re worried about the kids messing up dinner, just give them a bowl of their own ingredients to mix and make a mess with. 

 

-         Also related to this is sorting and pouring – give them some small cups or bowls and chopped vegetables, dried beans, or pasta and let them have fun!

 

-         Counting practice.  There are so many things to be counted – tablespoons of oil as they go into the pan, cups of flour being poured into the mixer, etc.  Or use some chopped veggies or dried beans (like in the last example) as manipulatives in simple addition and subtraction problems laid out on the counter.  Toddlers love to count!

 

-         Food storage percussion time.  This one is obvious, but it works really well with my fourteen month-old!

 

-         Setting the table.  My daughter likes to do this one piece at a time, so I let her place each dinner plate, salad bowl, napkin, fork, water cup, etc., as well as any other accoutrements like bread and butter.  She is quite meticulous and will arrange and re-arrange each piece several times.

 

-         Talking about the food being prepared and why we have chosen to eat it.  I’m no nutritionist, but I can give a basic defense behind everything – good or bad – that I choose to eat.  I tell them that the eggs are full of vitamins and protein to keep us healthy and strong, plus they’re a great source of fat for my dairy allergic daughter.  I explain that we can’t have cantaloupe right now because it would have to be shipped from far away Chile and wouldn’t taste very good, but that the blueberries in our freezer are available to us because we froze them after we picked them last summer.  Of course they don’t understand all the underlying concepts, but at least they are getting some knowledge hooks that will help them make these connections on their own as they get older.

 

 

If you think this is a short list, you’re right!  I would love suggestions, so please pass along any you have.  

2009 Goals, In-Depth: Spiritual Life, Parenting, and Personal Finance

I’m forcing myself to delineate my 2009 goals here so the people I know can hold me responsible.  So here’s more on the first three areas…

 

1.     Spiritual life

 

I need to find a time of day to read the bible (and do a few other things) without distractions.  I’ve been trying to do this at night before I go to bed, but that’s the problem – I’m too tired from the day to make it worthwhile.  I could wake up early and do this stuff – which is what a lot of productivity resources recommend – but I’m just not very good at doing that, either.  I have to start working (as a mom and as a babysitter) by 7:15am, so I’m lucky to get out of bed by 7.  The kids’ afternoon naptime is the best possibility right now, and if I can aim for just three days a week, this goal might be attainable.

 

2.     Parenting

I need to get back into structuring the day for the kids, so I will set aside a time (how about one of those afternoons during nap?) to plan out a week’s worth of activities.

3.     Personal finance

 

This last year was our best fiscal year ever – we are completely without consumer debt, we paid off my student loan, and now we’re just left with Husband’s student loan and the mortgage.  I’m still working, but completely from home, so if we can continue to pay off debt, we can work less.  With that being said, we realize we need to save money toward a minivan (eew, I can’t believe I just wrote that!).  That will be done with:

 

·        A few extra (occasional) babysitting commitments

·        The tax return

·        Eating out less – meaning once per week or less

·        Putting any overbudgeted money into savings (for instance, I budget $500/month for groceries and gas – if I spend less than that, the difference goes into savings)

This will all be done while maintaining another goal that I forgot to include in my last list – not shopping at Wal Mart.  This may sound contradictory to some of you – saving money and not shopping at the behemoth big box retailer.  But I will discuss this further when I detail my other goals.

Any other suggestions for achieving this set of goals?

The Biggest Cleaning Day of the Year

Thanks to sickness, the holidays, and procrastination in general, my house looks like a warzone.  So I worked all morning trying to clean the house, and I still didn’t scratch the surface.  For instance: there were two cookie sheets sitting on the counter near the sink, still bearing the remnants of roasted Brussels sprouts and sweet potato fries from Tuesday night’s dinner.  And the casserole dish with mac and cheese stuck to it from the night before.  Oh, and how about the dried egg remnants all over the island?  I will stop there.

 

I did, however, learn a valuable parenting lesson today: children will entertain themselves all day with a certain kind of manipulation.  While I worked on the kitchen, I kept telling my little girl to pick up her toys so we could do something fun.  But instead of picking up the toys, she would get distracted playing with them.  This worked very well for my ends, namely, the complete scrub-down of the kitchen.  We can get to picking up her toys tomorrow!

Who Started The Rumor That Childbirth Is The Worst Pain?

Because that is simply not true. 

 

From what I’ve heard, passing a kidney stone is way worse.  From what I’ve experienced, having a peritonsular abscess is.  I spent most of last night in the ER (thinking I had an ear infection, because my the right side of my face was numb and I had excruciating pain and pressure on the ear), only to find out that the thing I thought was a bad (read: so swollen and painful I didn’t eat and barely drank for three days) canker sore on the back of my tongue was the cause of ALL MY SYMPTOMS.

 

How does such a thing happen, you ask?  Nobody has given me a good answer.  Apparently, it’s a form of strep throat.  Since I’ve never had any throaty sicknesses, I had no clue.  All I can say is that my childbirth experiences do not compare, and oddly enough, were closer to this.

 

Back to the abscess.  So today, I had to follow up with an ENT (ear, nose, throat doctor) to see about, er, “clearing it.”  Since they didn’t have enough epinephrine like the dentists use to fully numb the area (and because of my adverse reaction to the stuff), they decide to use a liquid lidocaine anesthetic that you gargle with to numb the area.  It didn’t do a great job numbing the abscess, but even worse, they kept poking into the nerve it was sitting on that connects to my ear (this is called referred pain).  So I basically screamed through all of it while I held onto my ear. 

 

So what exactly was the procedure?  Stop reading here if you’re squeamish.  (Maybe that warning should’ve already been issued.  Oops!)

 

First, they stuck a hypodermic needle into the abscess to extract some of the pus.  When they didn’t strike gold the first time, they tried at two other locations.  When all of that proved unfruitful, they lanced it with a scalpel.  Oh yeah, did I mention that I was barely anesthetized?

Poo Talk

This post is about children.  I don’t usually write about parenting, but two other posts I read today got me thinking about how I treat my kids.  More specifically, about my relationship with my almost three year-old daughter.  We’ll call her Dee.

 

Dee has a moody, thoughtful temperament, but she is also quite garrulous and funny around those who know her well.  She is very sweet and has a little, high-pitched voice.  I’m worried, however, that I’m not always the patient, loving mom I should be.  Since she’s the oldest, I expect her to carry more responsibility, but she’s not even three years old yet! 

 

I’m worried that I’ve been too hard on her.  I guess I’ve come to this conclusion because of the roller coaster potty-training we’ve been doing for the past six months.  A few months after she turned two, SHE told us she wanted to start using the toilet.  We weren’t quite ready for that, as it was April or May, and we had planned on INTRODUCING the concept over the summer when my husband wasn’t working.  I went along with it anyway, and in less than a week, she was wearing underwear and getting through days (and nights!) accident-free. 

 

She did really well for a few months, but then the school year started and I started babysitting again.  She already knew the children I am babysitting, but for some reason, she’s had toilet issues ever since.  For awhile she would stay accident-free if I let her go around the house bottomless, but this week she pooped in her chair while eating breakfast (that’s right — no underwear or pull-up). 

 

Today I had the idea to set a timer for one hour, and everytime the timer went off, she had to go sit on the toilet.  So far (well, today) this has been successful, but she didn’t have to poop today, which is where things get tricky.  Hopefully, this is the golden ticket.

 

One article I read today was about the importance of eye contact.  Most parents know that the best way to make sure your child is listening is to get down to their level and make eye contact.  This article at Happy to be at Home stresses that making eye contact when your children talk to you about their own life is equally as important in developing and maintaining respect.  This was particulary convicting for me, because I tend to dish out a lot of uh-huhs and that’s great’s.  I spend a lot of cooking and cleaning and not enough time engaging my daughter and patiently inviting her to help.  She spends a lot of her time vying for my attention because I’m always finding something else to keep myself busy. 

 

Guest-blogger Danielle at Simple Mom also brings of the issue of respectful speech toward children, pointing out that we don’t give children the same respect we give adults.  I’ve always made an effort to not use baby talk with the kids, but I never considered that phrases like, “I guess your sister is in a bad mood, again” were probably not helping.  Funny how things seem so obvious after someone else points them out!