Life during the semester is pretty hectic. Sasha is at school most of the day and reads most all evenings after putting Ollie to bed. We don’t get to spend much time together as a complete family unit, so despite my feelings for actual cooking, I have decided to try to have most of dinner cooking, or prepped or in some state of coming together before Sasha gets home, so he can finish the cooking and we can all eat together. I really think it is important for us to eat together; meals are such a social experience and really the only time we can talk about our day and hang out with Oliver together. I want Oliver to be an adventurous eater and embrace trying new things. I think this can come with exposure, and when he sits at the table with us, he can eat some of what we eat and be exposed to different foods. I try to eat breakfast and lunch with Ollie at the table together everyday. I make him a little food, and make myself a little food, and we just sit and eat together. These are things that I want for us as he gets older, and think that the routines need to start while he is a baby so it is just a natural part of his day, and family life. He is so very interested in food and wants to try everything we eat. His palate is expanding, so far he seems to really like apples, yogurt, avocados, black beans, sweet potatoes, carrots, squash and corn; he is not so into peas and can be funny about bananas which really surprised me, how can you not like bananas? He is developing these preferences which just kill me. I made some mashed sweet potatoes, avocados, and bananas and froze them in little cubes, but he loves fresh baked sweet potato and avocado right out of the shell so much more. He is also a picky apple eater, which cracks me up, but his first apple was a perfect in-season, honeycrisp, he is just never quite as happy with a pink lady or a grannysmith. It makes sense for everything else to be down hill after the honeycrisp, but it is just so funny to watch the looks he gives the apples. Tonight I think I am going to try to start my first ever potato soup and am poking around for recipes, so if you have a good one please let me know, because there is a lot to sift through! Hopefully Sasha won't pass out when he comes home and finds me cooking in the kitchen for the second time this week.
A bit unrelated, but I have realized that what I miss most about our pre-baby days are Sunday mornings. I really want to find a regular sitter for Sunday morning so we can go have brunch and read the paper and spend about 3 hours a week just being us. I would rather have a dinner party at our house than go out to dinner, and going out to bars, drinking loads was not a huge part of our pre-Oliver relationship. Mulling over the Times and eating pancakes was. It would be really nice to just be with my boyfriend for a couple of hours a week.
Ugh, how can I make the foot of snow in our driveway magically disappear?
