A Day in the Life of Joshua

I know I'm more in love with my son than any of you, and these “Day in the Life” blogs may not be interesting to anyone except me, but I'm going to keep writing them anyway!  I love looking back at his little quirks, especially because his obsessions change so quickly.  He's a very intense, very unique little man and I'm lucky to be his mom. 

Our day usually starts around 6:30 when, as far as I can tell, he gets out of his toddler bed, sits in his room, and asks for one or both of us.  He hasn't tried to leave his room by himself yet, and I'm kind of dreading the day he realizes he's fully capable of walking over to the door and letting himself out anytime he feels like it.  We snuggle on the couch for a few minutes while he wakes up and then the fun begins!

Making french toast

Most days, the first thing he asks for is milk, and a close second is “Shark book?” (sounds like shaa boo or boo shaaa?  He hasn't quite gotten the syntax yet).  This boy LOVES sharks.  We regularly clean out the shark reference section at the library to satisfy his obsession.  After that, we usually move on to breakfast, which he prefers consist of pancakes or muffins (cake, as I call them), or a new favorite – cinnamon toast.  He recently discovered cinnamon sugar and nutella as condiment options, both of which he thoroughly enjoys.  He gets a kick out of helping me make the cinnamon toast (bread with butter and cinnamon sugar put under the broiler until the sugar melts), especially because he gets to eat the leftover cinnamon sugar while the bread is toasting.  He also loves to use the microwave.  I make big batches of pancakes when I have an appropriate vegetable laying around that would be good in pancakes, like squash or carrots or something, and then keep them in the freezer.  Josh loves to be in charge of opening and closing the microwave door and pushing all the buttons we need.  One morning he ate 6 pancakes (silver-dollar-sized, but still!), and I'm pretty sure he kept going just because he wanted to keep nuking them!

Since most child-centered businesses don't open until 10, we usually have a whole chunk of time to enjoy at home in the morning.  Josh splits his time fairly evenly between finger painting and playing with homemade playdough.  His finger painting pretty much consists of him choosing a color and telling me where on the paper he would like it.  I pour a dollop down and he smears it around.  The three colors he seems to request most are purple, brown, and blue.  Maybe someday we'll get to the point where he actually wants to paint things instead of just make streaks of color.  His most favorite thing to do with the playdough is make sculptures with the pieces from a Mr. Potatohead set, especially the eyes.   

Seriously?  The kid won't eat a KitKat but he'll eat salt playdough!

My little Picasso

He asked to go out - it was about -20

When we lived in Boston, we played outside every day, snow, rain or shine, and Josh loved it.  Here, though, he's not so excited to go out.  He LOVED playing in the snow here when it was still warm enough and humid enough that we could make snowballs.  Since the cold has really set in (it was -27 this morning), the snow is too dry to pack and he is no longer interested enough to endure the uncomfortable clothes and extensive preparation time, not to mention the cold.  Although he doesn't particularly want to play in the snow, he does enjoy going for walks as long as he's bundled up in his stroller. 

Because he doesn't usually want to play outside, we have found some fun things to do around town.  The public library here has a wonderful children's room with a small aquarium, a whole closet full of puzzles (a HUGE favorite – Josh will play with “puppies” for as long as I'll let him), a Lego table, and computers with kids' games.  We spend at least one morning a week at our local PetCo wandering around the aquarium section watching the fish swim.  Barnes and Noble is also one of our regular spots, not only because of the books but they also have a pretty cool train table in the kid area. 

When we're not finger painting or making sculptures with playdough, Josh has also become quite an accomplished train track-builder.  He doesn't usually drive a train on his creations, he just builds for the sake of building.  He also loves to read his books, preferably without me present.  He doesn't like me to read to him or with him, but he’ll easily spend 20 minutes sitting on the floor looking at his books by himself. 

Opening the cupboards

Making no-bake cookies, which he wouldn't eat when finished

In an effort to get him more interested in food, Josh and I cook together often.  His favorite part is to pour ingredients into the mixing bowl.  He is terrified of all of my appliances, though, so when mixing time comes around (unless it’s something we can mix with a spoon, which he enjoys) he makes himself scarce.  For some reason, his food aversions don’t always extend to food that we’re preparing.  If it’s something we’re in the middle of making, he’ll put almost anything in his mouth, including homemade playdough consisting of cornstarch, baking soda, and water!  As soon as it’s finished and an official food and no longer “dough” (which he calls anything we make together), he won’t touch it anymore.  Although getting sticky doesn’t seem to bother him while we’re cooking, when he’s done he must wash his hands immediately.  Usually when he’s done helping me, and often throughout the day, he likes to go through the kitchen and open every drawer and cupboard he can reach and then close them all. 

Making cinnamon rolls

He was a great helper until we got out the brown sugar - then he just ate sugar the rest of the time!

Josh’s current favorite movies are Toy Story, Madgascar, and most recently Happy Feet.  He doesn’t get to watch movies very often, but he asks all the time.  He knows it’s kind of a special thing, so when he’s going to ask, he puts on his very best little smile, clasps his hands, and asks “Woody?” or “Fish Nemo?” or just “Watch?  Please?”  It gets hard to say no sometimes because he asks so very adorably, and because I know I’ll get to hear his quite rare little giggle while he’s watching.  His favorite part of Toy Story, strangely, is when Buzz and Woody argue.  It makes him crack right up and it’s one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen.  He also loves, of course, when the shark pops out of the toy box with Woody’s hat on and says “Hi, I’m Woody!  Howdy howdy howdy howdy.”  He has also recently become fascinated with seeing pictures of himself.  Anytime I get out the laptop when he’s awake, he comes running over and asks to see pictures of “Josh?”  Until last week, anytime he saw the computer he asked to see “shark movie,” by which he means National Geographic videos of sharks on YouTube.  When he’s having a particularly hard day or there’s something I absolutely need to get done while he’s awake, watching shark videos on YouTube will keep him occupied indefinitely.  I find it interesting that although watching Marlin and Dory argue on Finding Nemo scares him, watching videos of real sharks attacking things doesn’t faze him in the least.

When Mario gets home from work shortly after 5, we eat dinner.  This is a very fluid concept for Josh and we’re still working on finding a good system to help him expand his extremely limited food repertoire.  

Drawing - another favorite.  It's actually not unusual for him to wear the Mr. Potatohead glasses for a while.  Funny kid!

In the evening, sometimes Josh and I bake something, or we’ll resort to finger painting or playdough for a while, but one of our favorite activities is to play with glow sticks.  Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of our glow stick parties, but we all have a great time playing with the lights off.  We also play with flash lights and get out all of his toys that have lights.  Sometimes we even play with glow sticks on weekend mornings since the sun doesn’t come up until well after 9am these days.  We’ve also had glow stick baths, which is a lot of fun too. 

After we’ve done all we can to wear the little guy out, we tuck him into bed and hope we don’t see him until the next morning.  We’ve had a lot of sleeping issues lately where he’ll wake up anytime between midnight and 2 am and not go back to sleep for 3-5 hours.  He usually just lies in his bed and cries for us every 15-20 minutes.  I would actually prefer it if he would just yell and wear himself out so he could go back to sleep, but it seems he’s just genuinely not tired.  And the times that we have let him “cry it out” after he’s been asking for us for an hour or so, he’s cried so hard he throws up.  We’ve started giving him a bedtime snack and fortified milk right before bed thinking that maybe he was waking up because he was hungry, but even with a good dinner and his milk he has still been up all night a few times.  Hopefully we can get this figured out by the time this baby gets here, because I don’t think any of us will survive more than a couple nights like that!  One particular morning after he woke up at 2 am and never went back to sleep, he was so tired by 9 am that he fell stone cold asleep in the middle of getting his diaper changed.

Speaking of a baby arriving, I’ve been having contractions . . . lots and lots of contractions.  Last weekend I had regular ones between 5 and 15 minutes apart for eight hours, and the same but for less time a couple nights before and since then.  It’s a little nerve-wracking to wonder pretty much every night if I’m actually going in to labor, but it’s also nice that these seem to be just false labor since Mom doesn’t get here for a week and a half and this little girl needs to hold her little horses until then!  I finally got around to taking a belly picture – this is at 38 weeks.  It’s so different than with the first one.  With Josh, we had everything we needed weeks in advance and took belly pictures every month, and then I was induced a week after his due date.  This time, I feel like we’re not ready for her at all and she may come any day!  I guess that’s why I’ve been trying to get all these posts done, because I feel like if I don’t do it now it will get lost in the mayhem of a new baby and I’ll never get around to it. 

Hopefully the next blog will be about our new arrival!

Recent Foodie Adventures

We’ve been having some fun with food lately, and not just when Josh wants to help me cook!  One fun aspect of being on a much tighter budget now than we have been the past few years is that we buy things when they’re on sale and then we figure out a good way to use them instead of our traditional route of picking a recipe we want to try and shopping specifically for that.  This has led to some surprisingly successful dishes.

I invented a pear-squash dessert wonton a while back that was amazing.  It had acorn squash (or any non-stringy fleshed squash) roasted with butter, brown sugar, and salt.  I mashed that up with cream cheese, nutmeg, cinnamon, and brown sugar and then mixed in peeled, diced, very ripe pears and a dash of lemon juice.  I loaded my filling into wonton wrappers and deep fried them to a golden brown.  We ate them dipped in homemade caramel sauce.  They disappeared too quickly to get a picture of, unfortunately, but they will definitely be making an appearance next fall and for many falls after that!  

Roasted tomato soup

The soup before pureeing

When the weather started turning cold and tomatoes went on sale, we made tomato soup.  We used this recipe by Tyler Florence and it was unspeakably good.  We just used run-of-the-mill tomatoes on the vine (or whatever is on sale) and it turned out amazing.  The roasting gives the veggies just the right amount of sweetness.  If you’ve never met a tomato soup you liked, you really should give this a shot!  We added grated parmesan to our bowls and served the soup with extra sharp cheddar grilled cheese sandwiches (Tillamook cheese was on sale too!) and parmesan-garlic toast.  

Mario’s been enjoying his pasta maker and has tried his hand at a homemade fettuccini carbonara with lots of bacon and caramelized onions, a lovely invention with leftover roasted chicken, sautéed veggies and a simple parmesan white sauce, and straight up homemade spaghetti marinara.

 

Baked rigatoni with sausage and eggplant

Although it’s not with homemade pasta, one of our new favorite dishes is baked rigatoni with sausage and eggplant.  We always double the eggplant because it’s just so darn good!  Be sure to cut the eggplant into pretty big pieces and pan-fry in small batches.  

Back in the fall when peaches were on sale, I discovered a recipe (see below) for cornmeal pancakes in my much-loved Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. I substituted diced peaches for the blueberries (although they’re also delicious with blueberries!), used a bit more sugar than the recipe calls for as well as adding nutmeg, and served them with fresh peaches, vanilla nonfat yogurt, and lemon simple syrup.   We had these every weekend while our peaches held out!  

We love to make ethnic food for three reasons: it’s delicious; we don’t have a budget to support eating out at the moment so our only option is to make it ourselves; and there aren’t a lot of dining options in Fairbanks anyway so it we’d have to make it ourselves anyway!  I had tried a few sub-standard recipes for naan (an Indian yeast bread) to go with our dishes at home and was unimpressed with the results.  Then I found this recipe.  Now I always make at least a double batch (using my stand mixer since the dough is unusually wet for a yeast dough and is difficult to knead by hand) and freeze some (after baking) so we always have it on hand.  It’s delicious brushed with butter hot out of the oven, or you can make a compound butter with garlic or any kind of Indian spices you like to brush on top.  I bake mine on my pizza stone and it always turns out beautiful.

Cornmeal Blueberry Pancakes (from Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook)

1 cup all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons cornmeal

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 beaten egg

1 cup buttermilk or sour milk

2 tablespoons cooking oil

1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries

1. In a bowl combine flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Make a well in center of flour mixture; set aside.

2. In another bowl stir together the egg, buttermilk, and oil. Add egg mixture all at once to flour mixture. Stir just until moistened (batter should be lumpy). Gently fold in blueberries.

3. For each pancake, pour or spread about 1/4 cup of the batter into a 4-inch circle onto a hot, lightly greased griddle or heavy skillet. Cook over medium heat about 2 minutes on each side or until pancakes are golden brown, turning to second sides when pancakes have bubbly surfaces and edges are slightly dry. Serve warm. If desired, top with syrup.

Halloween

Josh's, Mario's, and mine - they're all currently buried in snow and frozen on the porch!

Blowing out the candle

We took a second crack at carving pumpkins since the one we did when YaYa was visiting had started to look like it lost its dentures (the result of freezing and thawing multiple times).  It was a lovely family evening and I think the jack-o-lanterns turned out pretty nice.  Josh was still disgusted by the seeds and stuff, but he was quite fascinated by what we were doing with the pumpkins.  His has a bunch of sharks, fish, and bubbles and he really liked it.  His favorite part of the activity, though, was blowing out the candles over and over (and over and over and . . . ). 

The straw whistles were a hit!

Trying to eat chocolate donuts on a string

We had hoped to dress Josh as a shark for Halloween given his current fascination with them, but we weren't able to find a shark costume we liked.  Instead we dressed him as a judge!  He first tried out his costume at our church Halloween party.  He sort of enjoyed trying to eat a donut hanging from a string and really enjoyed the chocolate he got, but his best score of the evening by far was a couple of whistling straws that he wouldn't stop blowing for the rest of the evening.

Since Josh doesn't talk much and didn't really get the “Trick or Treat” idea, we thought it would be best for him to go trick-or-treating with his cousins, Natalie and Collin, who could show him the ropes.  He had his full snow suit under his judge robe, and we had white hairspray to approximate a judge's wig, but decided it was too cold (it was 7 degrees) for his head to be exposed.  So we did a last-minute adjustment with some white construction paper and tape to make his beanie into something suggesting white hair.  We had a fun evening with Jed, Crystal, & Co.  Josh's current aversion to almost everything edible surprisingly even extends to candy – the only stuff he'll eat is plain Hershey bars and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.  He's tried half a dozen other kinds and spits it all out.  Crazy kid!

Curling!

The "rock"

For some reason, there was about 100 hours of Olympic curling broadcasted during the last winter Olympics. At first it was really annoying, but we grew pretty interested in it by the time the Games were over. Little did we know we'd be moving to Alaska where you can actually go curling! The local curling hall had an introductory class back in October and Mario got to go. He found out that curling is quite a bit more difficult than it seems. In fact, there were people falling down all over the place, let alone throwing the “rock” appropriately. He had a lot of fun. Since this was shortly after Josh broke his leg and he wasn't all that entertained watching people curl, he and I went for a little walk and happened to catch this awesome sunset.   

Dad's visit

We were lucky enough to have my dad come visit just a few weeks after Mom came. He only had a few days, so we made sure we had enough planned to give him as much of the Alaskan experience as we could.

Fielding Lake public cabin

C and N

Not sure what the weird face is about, but it's the only one of everyone

Jed and his family took him out to the Chena cabin and hot springs the first night, then we all headed out to Fielding Lake where we found a fun little cabin to stay at. Fielding Lake is near the beginning of the Denali Highway and usually offers great views of the mountains, but it started snowing the day Dad got here and kind of just kept going on and off, so we didn't get the scenery we were looking for. We did get to see some animals, though, like moose, eagles, and muskrats chasing ducks. 

 There was a stretch of highway where Mario and I saw almost 10 bald eagles, but unfortunately Dad and Jed in the car ahead of us missed them. The landscape that we could see was impressive, but I sure wish we could have shown Dad more of the Denali area.

We ventured out the Denali Highway for a few miles in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the mountains, but we had to settle for a fun little hill and some fresh snow to play in. There were a bunch of kettle lakes that we could see, most of which had little beaver lodges in them.

After our Fielding Lake outing, we headed back to Fairbanks to catch a hockey game. Dad used to be the doctor for a hockey team in Minot, North Dakota when we lived there and we thought he would enjoy going to see a game. We watched the University of Alaska Nanooks trounce a team from Nebraska. It was a lot of fun, and we certainly plan to go a few more times this year, but I was somewhat lost as far as some of the rules and really need to study up before we go again. I waited all evening to get this shot of a guy getting checked. Check out the grimace.

We got to celebrate Collin's birthday the next morning before Dad had to leave. It was so nice to get to spend some time with Dad and show him our little corner of the world. We loved having him and are excited for him to come up again just as soon as he can!

Just a quick update on the little bun in the oven. We've had a couple ultrasounds that showed she's growing well and is on track for her due date of December 5^th. I'm about as big as a whale and chasing Josh is a bit of a challenge these days, but he's a good sport about it. I'm pretty sure he has no idea what it means when we tell him about the baby, but when we ask him where the baby is he'll give my belly hugs or kisses. He was pretty excited to see her on the ultrasound, though, but I think that was because it was like watching a movie more than because he was seeing a baby.

December 5^th (the due date) is just less than 5 weeks away and I'm trying to soak up every last minute I still have with just Josh. I'll admit I'm quite uncomfortable but not so uncomfortable that I'm actually ready to have a newborn quite yet, for the stress and sleeplessness but more because I'm not ready to spend less time with my little man. He's my whole life from the time he wakes up until Mario gets home in the evening and I'm not ready to give that up yet, especially since he's been making small but important steps with his speaking and eating lately. He recently tested at a 12-month level in his verbal communication, and the number of foods he was willing to eat was alarmingly low. We start speech therapy next week and have been working on the eating issues, though, and I'm excited to see what he'll be able to do in the next few months.

YaYa's Visit

My mom came to visit at the end of September. It was wonderful to see her and it was also a great excuse to do some fun stuff.

Public use cabin near Chena Hot Springs

Inside the cabin

We got lucky and found one of Alaska's numerous public use cabins the first weekend she was here near Chena Hot Springs. I got photos of the cabin, but unfortunately not of the hot springs. You can take a look here at their website to see just how cool this place is. It was a rainy/snowy and dreary day, so the little hike we tried to take was a very short-lived affair, but it was a perfect day to sit in a huge, hot swimming pool in the snow.

Our short walk in the rain/snow

The first evening Mom spent at our house was the night Josh's leg broke, which put a big dent in our activities for the week, but we still had fun.

The next weekend we went to a different natural hot springs called Manley, which is about three hours into the bush outside of Fairbanks. The town of Manley is pretty much a village and has only one business that rents cabins.  We called the week before to make sure they were still going to be open when we wanted to come as the town basically closes down in the winter. They said they would be, but when we arrived, we found the Manley Roadhouse, which rents the cabins, all closed up. Luckily we were traveling with Jed and Crystal, which is great because Crystal is resourceful and personable and she politely poked around until she found someone who knew someone who knew what was going on and could open up the place for us.

Manley Hot Springs is a privately-owned

Some of the flora at Manley Hot Springs

 natural hot spring and is probably the most unique place I've seen here. The actual spring is up a hill and the owners have piped it down into a large greenhouse where they have built four huge water basins that are all different 

Two of the hot spring basins

temperatures. The greenhouse is completely full of plants, from hibiscus to eggplant. It was a wonderful place. The remnants of the hot spring that aren't piped out for use in the bathing pools flow down the hill as a little stream that is delightfully warm and the kids (and grandma!) had fun putting their feet in the water.

Very cool place

Josh wasn't a fan of pumpkin guts

Cider donuts

We took advantage of having Grandma here to carve pumpkins for the kids, which brought back memories of Halloweens past when Grandma (then just Mom) would make fresh raised donuts from scratch. That put us in the mood for donuts, which Mom obligingly made for us.  They were delicious and I think we all ate ourselves fairly sick. That got me thinking, though, of apple cider donuts, so I found a promising-looking recipe and gave it a whirl. It didn't really work out. They tasted great, but cooked very poorly and either ended up soaked in grease, burned, or doughy. Very sad.

It was a great visit and we were all sad to see her go!

 

I don't know why Josh is compelled to do this with every light that comes into his hands