A "Speedy" Dinner and Some Updates

This post is half out of order. We actually made this dinner last week, but I never got around to posting about it.

My kids aren't super picky eaters, but sometimes they are S.L.O.W. especially Lincoln, who would rather play with his food than eat it, and only decides he wants to eat it when his other option is bath time/bed time. My friend Misty and I joke around all the time that with toddlers, it's all about the presentation, especially when it comes to food. And I thought this idea of "presenting" dinner looked like a lot of fun.

 Anyways, I was reading the Show and Tell Tuesday on ABC and 123 and someone had done these super cute sloppy joe cars. My boys are WAY into cars. Cars are really the only guaranteed hit every time, while other toys come and go. So I thought they'd get a kick out of seeing a car served as their dinner.

It was really easy too. You just take a hoagie bun (I split one bun in half for Lincoln's and Ivan's cars), cut a square hole in the top of it, and fill it with sloppy joe filling. The lady on the website I got this idea from used cucumbers as her wheels and cherry tomatoes cut in half as her headlights, but since I didn't have either of those, I used a zucchini for the wheels and pieces of a cut up tomoato for headlights. (We took all the leftover tomato and zucchini pieces and sauted them in butter with salt and pepper to go with, and it was delicious!) Stick the wheels and headlights in place with tooth picks, and wha-la! Dinner "to go". :)

Aaron thought this was a silly idea, but like a good husband went along with it. The kids loved it! Although, it didn't really help Lincoln eat any faster, I do think it made the meal a little bit more fun for him, and it was a nice break from the usual dinner routine.

Ok, now we're back in order. Adelia is still having a "rough" stretch at nights between about 10pm and 1am (on a good night) or 4am (a bad night). We decided that the acid reflux medicine wasn't doing any good, and so we've stopped giving it to her, and are just left with the crazy things we can come up with on our own to soothe her. One of them, I think is rather funny...but she tends to like having the blanket up over the top of her head. I have no idea why that's comforting, but my dad used to do the same thing with his blanket from Ethiopia when he was getting his chemotherapy treatments. I think she looks like Golda (from Fiddler on the Roof) when she has the blanket wrapped around her head, but hey, if it helps her to be calm then bring it on. Another thing that will usually calm her down is to put her in the Snuggly and walk around with her. It's an okay method, if you like having her weight on your shoulders all the time, and you don't mind pacing back and forth in the living room over and over. The only problem is that she'll usually wake up when you take her out of it. Sometimes not though, and that's probably why we keep doing it. Every once in awhile she'll go in the Snuggly, fall asleep, and then stay asleep when you transfer her to her bed or bouncy chair. When that happens it's like heaven.

Last night, after I'd been up with her for about 4 hours, I finally got her to sleep, or so I thought. I went to my own bed to lay down, and half hour later she was crying again. I must have been really out of it at that point. Aaron got up to go get her, and asked me when I'd fed her last. I told him in a really annoyed voice (annoyed that she was up after only a half an hour of being down, not annoyed with Aaron.) that I'd just barely fed her at 2:30. And I was very adamant about it. Aaron looked at the clock and started laughing, and said, "But it's only 1:40 now." Laugh all you want, I was tired. Thankfully by 3:00ish she was once again well fed, and asleep, and she slept until 7:00am. It was a nice stretch of sleep. It would have been a lot nicer, if Lincoln and Ivan hadn't gotten up twice somewhere in the middle of it. Oh well.

I also thought I should take a quick paragraph to update Ivan's situation. We've been doing a lot of reading and a lot of talking to different people. Our conclusion, for the moment, is that Ivan has a milk intolerance, as apposed to an allergy. From the research we've done, we've determined that when you have an allergic reaction, you're body digests the food, the food then gets into your blood stream, and then your body doesn't like it, so you get an allergic reaction such as a rash or hives. But with an intolerance, your body can't digest (or tolerate) the food you've eaten, and tries to get rid of it as quickly as possible, like throwing it up or pooping it out. It would be like us eating grass. Anyways, there's really nothing an allergist can do for an intolerance, so we've decided, for now, not to take Ivan in to see one. Also, Aaron's sister was telling us, that when you have an intolerance, your body spends so much of it's energy trying to deal with the intolerance, that you are more susceptible to getting sick, and you are likely to stay sick longer because your body is trying to do so many things at once. I think I can see that in Ivan.

So for now, we are just keeping him off of dairy, and learning what all has dairy in it (like the Cheez-it crackers I didn't even think about twice before giving him that he threw up everywhere. Oops.) and trying to avoid those things. I'm trying to find a good, child friendly, dairy free cook book. Anyone know a good one?