Let's Nosh!

I can't decide whether to pull out paper scraps & scissors or a frying pan first. This past three weeks these books--"Let's Nosh!", "Yum, Yum, Dim Sum" and "First Book of Sushi", all by Amy Wilson Sanger--have been my favorites for snuggling and reading, and for studying on my own.


They're part of Sanger's "World Snacks" series, and along with exposing little ones (they're all board books, horray!) to many foods, and bouncing along with cute, rhymes, the illustrations are detailed, clever paper sculpture/collages of each dish. And often the foods are shown as babies see them--filling sippy cups or sitting on high chair trays.


Avocado slices preped for sushi rolls, paper wrappers around dumplings, and my favorite, lox on bagels. Clever and mouthwatering.

The collages remind me of the play food that kids in an after-school program I once worked at would make from construction paper. I remember egg rolls, where the kids would carefully cut out all of the ingredients, wrap them in brown paper and fasten with tape. In the end you only saw the outside, but they knew they had made their egg rolls the way their parents did at home.

These three are heading back to the library today. We've also checked out "Mangia! Mangia!" (Italian) and "A Little Bit of Soul Food" in the past, and while finding Amazon links I see she's got "Hola! Jalapeno," "Chaat and Sweets" as well.

Lunchtime

We eat lunch in silence, Turtle & I. Alone, I'll eat in front of the computer. With Christer, we talk as we eat. But with a pre-chatty baby, and a mama happy to sit and focus on the food for a minute, lunchtime is very quiet.

Turtle is very deliberate about his meal. He likes using a fork, sometimes to mix the food, sometimes to stab it and then pick the pieces off the prongs and into his mouth with his fingers. He takes each bite out of his bowl, and puts it back in again. Today he ate a bagel from the top down--that is he scooped off the cream cheese first, then chewed off any part of the bagel that had been touching the cream cheese, and finally resorted to eating up the remaining crust.

I eat my sandwich, too. Today, in the quiet, I watched him work on his meal while remembering to be thankful that I bothered to cut up a bit of onion, even though it was just me eating it, because it made the sandwich that much better. The quiet gives a chance to remember to be present, to notice the food, the company, the silence.

When he's almost done, Turtle glances at me with a mischievous glimmer and slowly tips his cup over. A few drips fall onto the tray before my look stops him. As I relax, he tries again, and I know he's done. In a quick motion the cup & bowl are pulled away, hands & mouth are wiped, the baby is freed from his chair and he runs back to his toys.

Begin Again

With this blank blog in front of me, I suddenly feel shy. I've blogged before, under this same title--but I've been truant lately, and it seemed time for something new. Even without keeping the discipline of blogging I find myself writing posts in my head. Composing these little messages seems to be my way of making sense of my day, pausing to notice the times I find creativity in the mundane & joy in the now. And so welcome to my space. Where I'm sure I'll share knitting, and probably baby photos, and maybe some cooking, and maybe some religion as that seems to be on my mind more and more lately.

Or maybe I'll stray off in some new direction entirely. I'm just hoping that I find ways of working this blog back into my routine. Because I do enjoy filling these blank pages.