You're a Vegan, What Do You Eat? (Dashboard Cookie Edition)

It has been an embarrassingly long time since I have made a YAVWDYE post.  Might as well jump back into the game with a recipe for vegan chocolate chip cookies, baked on the dashboard of your Prius!

It all started last winter, when one of my favorite vegan cooking sites (Plant Based on a Budget) published a recipe for Trail Mix Cookies.  I love these cookies.  The beauty of them is that you start with a basic dough (vegan butter, flour, sugar, brown sugar) and you can add pretty much anything you want to them.  They always turn out great.

Here is how I usually make them:

1/4 cup Earth Balance

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup sugar

Dash vanilla extract

1 tsp baking soda, dissolved in 1 tablespoon warm water

1/2 cup (heaping) flour

1/2 tsp salt

~1 cup quick cooking oats

chopped peanuts

chopped dried apricots or dried cranberries

non-dairy chocolate chips

--> Occaisionally I also add sunflower seeds, ground flax seeds dissolved in water, and/or shredded coconut.

They are delicious:

You can also add molasses to them and they turn out darker, still delicious:

 

Earlier this week, Snarky Vegan reposted the link to her blog entry on how to bake cookies on the dashboard of your car.  Basically, you just need a car, some vegan cookie dough, a very hot day, and cookie sheets lined with aluminum foil.  Visit her site for the full instructions on how to do it.

I thought this would be a fun project for me and Will last Friday-- he often likes helping add the ingredients and stirring when I bake things (though he rarely if ever eats the finished product).  I tried to get him pumped up about baking cookies in the car, but he was decidedly unamused and preferred to play with his trains.  The dashboard cookies turned out to be a largely solitary effort.

I started off with some basic vegan cookie dough:

 

Then I placed the cookie sheets on the dashboard of the Prius:

 

And waited.  And waited.  While it was definitely a very hot day, our driveway is a little shady, so it took a while for the car to get hot enough for the cookies to bake.

 

At last, I decided they were done!

*Note: be sure to use potholders to get the cookies out of the car! This pan had been out for a couple minutes already so it was cool enough for us to touch it like we are in the picture above.

 

I was hoping Will would be excited to have a cookie for a snack.  He did seem interested in the cookies, so I took one off the cookie sheet and handed to him.  He smiled and shook his head.  I asked him to please try it, and to his credit, he did bravely take one bite.  But then he handed it back to me and said, "I don't want it," and ran back inside.

If you have a kid who eats food, please, please, consider yourself lucky.  

More for Rob and me to enjoy, I guess.  

I thought the cookies turned out pretty well, and it didn't heat up the house to make them.  They were a little gooier (sp?) than usual, but there's nothing wrong with that.  

Many more hot days ahead in St. Louis this summer--I'm definitely planning on making these again.  Hopefully Will will eat one this time, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Thanks to Snarky Vegan for the tip, and thanks for reading!

You're a Vegan, What Do You Eat? (Thanksgiving Edition)

 

We stayed at home for Thanksgiving this year, and for the first time in my life, I made a complete Vegan Thanksgiving dinner on my own.

The whole thing started when I got off work a little bit early on Wednesday afternoon.  I began cooking after I picked up William and he was (supposed to be) taking a nap.  First order of business was to make cornbread.  William eats exactly 5 foods, and "Mr. Mike's Cornbread" (Mr. Mike being the cook at daycare) is one of them.  I don't know how Mr. Mike makes his cornbread, but it surely involves eggs and probably butter and milk.  The cornbread I made did not, but it was both amazing and easy.  It involved ground up flax seed as egg replacer (my favorite form of egg substitute), flour, cornmeal, baking powder, salt, agave, soy milk, and canola oil.  Put it in a square baking dish and bake for 20 minutes.  Beauty.

Next, I made pumpkin pie.  Many, many years ago, I used to have this vegan pumpkin pie recipe that I got off a tofu box or something, and I have since lost.  I tried to recreate it from memory, using canned pureed pumpkin, half a tub of Tofutti cream cheese, half a block of silken tofu, some amount of soy milk, maybe 1/2 cup of brown sugar, a drizzle of molasses, and a good tablespoon of pumpkin pie spice.  Whirl that in the blender until it is well mixed.  Then pour it in to a graham cracker crust (surprisingly, the Keebler brand appears to be vegan).

The quantity of pumpkin filling I had mixed up way exceeded the capacity of the graham cracker crust.  I had also bought some little bitty, individual serving graham crusts, thinking that William might be intrigued by the smallness and cuteness of them, and so I filled 3 of these with the pie filling as well.  

Then it occurred to me that I had just made an entire pumpkin pie and 3 additional tiny pumpkin pies, and Rob probably wasn't going to eat it because he doesn't' like pie, and William probably wasn't going to eat it because pie is not on his list of 5 Approved Foods.  So I had a lot of pie going on, and in all probability, I was the only person who was going to eat it.  To make matters worse, there was still more filling.  I thought about putting it in a tupperware and freezing it, or maybe even throwing it out, but instead I took the I Love Lucy route and simply ate it.  Divine.

I baked the tiny pies for about 20 minutes and the big pie for about an hour, then I let them cool and put them in the fridge overnight.

My last order of business for Thanksgiving Eve was to make a cranberry relish.  Also a food that probably no one in my house cared about or would want to eat.  But I felt compelled to make it anyway.  I saw a couple of recipes here and there and decided to combine them into one of my own.  What I did was take 1/2 package of fresh cranberries, 3 stalks of celery, 1 apple, 1 orange, some orange zest, about 1/4 cup sugar, and a smack of cinnamon.  Then I put that in the food processor and 10 seconds later: cranberry relish.  

Thanksgiving morning involved going to the parade downtown via the MetroLink, or as Will likes to call it, The Train.  Will was more interested in climbing up and down the many staircases at Kiener Park, but I was in my element  watching the parade.

First, we waited for the parade to start.

 

 

When it finally did, we saw senior citizens playing accordions.

 

We saw Frosty the Snowman.

We saw Jackie Joyner-Kersee

We got empowered by the YWCA.

I became nostalgic for the days when I was 16 and marched in parades and had to hold my line.


Finally, the real Santa Claus arrived.

 

After the parade, we went back home and while Will was taking a nap, I got the rest of the meal ready.  This involved a Trader Joe's Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast.  I have never before eaten something like this, and I hadn't even been planning on buying it last weekend when I was shopping at Trader Joe's.  But as I saw it in the store and stood there examining the package, another shopper saw my confusion and assured me, "I've had that before.  It's really good."  And so I thought, why not.  I'd been planning on making some kind of marinated tofu concoction and making my own stuffing and gravy.  But this Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast contained it all.  A texturized soy protein thing that was stuffed with stuffing and included a packet of gravy.  All vegan.  It seemed like a win-win situation.

To cook the Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast, I took some celery stalks, quartered small potatoes, turnips, carrots, and garlic and layered that in the bottom of the roasting pan.  I put the Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast on top of that and basted it with a sauce made of Earth Balance (they claim to responsibly source their palm oil, which I hope is true), garlic powder, and fresh sage (that I had bought for some other purpose but since forgotten why) and a smack of liquid smoke.  I covered the the whole thing with foil and cooked it for about an hour and a half.

I also made peas, which involved taking a bag of frozen peas out of the freezer and microwaving them.  And I made gravy, which involved opening the container of gravy that came with the Roast and microwaving it.  At the last minute, I juiced some apples and cranberries to make fresh cran-apple juice.  Festive.

 

When Will woke up from his nap, he was in rare form-- in a good way.  He had been thrilled to ride on the train earlier in the day and run around at the park while (sort of) watching the parade.  We had also been talking up Thanksgiving, and I could tell that the didn't know exactly what that meant, but it intrigued him.  He was on his best behavior.  When I told him that we were having cornbread with dinner, he squealed and jumped for joy (literally) and then went to his chair to sit and wait for the meal.

So here it is, our Vegan Thanksgiving Spread:

 

And here's a close-up of the Trader Joe's Turkey-less Stuffed Roast, or as I now like to call it, The Roast Beast

Okay, so it looks really weird, but honestly, it was pretty good.  The vegetables were the most amazing part of the whole meal, though.  Roasting them in the Earth Balance/Garlic powder baste and then drizzling them with gravy made them out-of-this-world sublime.

 

Scrumptious.

Will ate some peas and cornbread of his own volition.  He declined the cranberry relish (so did Rob) and he told me he didn't want any of the vegetables or "Roast Beast."  With an extreme amount of coaxing, but less frustration than a normal meal (it generally takes about 10 years off of my life just to get him to eat 100 calories worth of food), I did manage to get him to eat one roasted carrot and a slice of Roast Beast.  Victory.

True to my prediction, I was the only person who ate any pumpkin pie.  And wine.

 

Above all, I was really thankful to get to stay at home and have a very nice, very relaxing Vegan Thanksgiving with Rob and Will.  Rob and I are both under immense pressure from up-coming deadlines, and the stress around this household has been all but palpable for the past several weeks.  Adding in a multi-state traveling odyssey to this mix felt like it would have pushed us over the edge.  We did not get to see our families, but at least this way, we got to have real, actual, vegan food and do everything on our own schedules.  Which is to say, Will's schedule.  We needed this.  We had such a great time together, the three of us, and there were very few moments when anyone threw himself on the ground screaming and crying.  It was an all-out stellar day.

Cooking the meal wasn't really that hard, and I think it turned out pretty darn good.  I'd do it again, and again.  I'll do it for Christmas, and next year too.  You're all invited.

 

Thanks for reading.

 

You're a vegan, what do you eat? (Part 1)

A long time ago when life was a lot different, I had this great idea to do a blog series entitled, You're vegan? What do you eat? and showcase some of my better culinary endeavors.  Life and hyperemesis intervened, and I spent a lot of time dealing with that.  I'm still dealing with that, and there are a lot of foods I used to eat that I still can't eat, but I think that things are finally starting to get a little bit better.  Plus, I feel like much of the rest of the world probably thinks that vegans eat only iceberg lettuce (which we don't), and I would like to set the record straight.

So here's a compilation of what we ate (mainly for dinner) this week.

You'll notice that almost everything comes from my new favorite website, Plant Based on a Budget, but also that nothing I make follows their recipes exactly because I am incapable of following a recipe exactly. Also, I don't measure anything.  I think I own measuring cups, but I do not use them.

Monday 29 October

Up at 6:15am to run 5-ish miles then shower, get ready, and get little people their breakfast before school.  While Will was dawdling over his Raisin Bran, I made what I like to call Chickpea Salad-- a modified version of Mock Tuna Salad from the good people at PBB.

I used some chickpeas that I had previously soaked, boiled, frozen and then thawed overnight.  Gave them a whirl or two in the old food processor and then mixed them up with Vegan Mayo (currently using Nayonaise), chopped green onion, parsley, and celery, lemon pepper, sea salt, and apple cider vinegar.  Sometimes I also add smoked paprika, but on this particular occasion, it seemed too overwhelming to search through my spice bin for that, so I left it out.  I put the whole thing in the fridge to chill, and left for work.

It was a good thing that I made dinner ahead of time because I ended up having to work until 8:30pm that night.  

When I finally got home, this was like heaven on a bun (with romaine and sliced tomato).

 

Tuesday 30 October

I soaked some lentils overnight, and after my pre-dawn run (this time a bit less than 5 miles) I boiled them enough so that foam formed on the top, and I skimmed that off.  I've found that using this foam-skimming technique eliminates any kind of gastric distress anyone might experience from eating beans or legumes.

After the lentils were boiled and soaked, I added them to the crock pot with chopped onion, crushed (canned) tomatoes, chili powder (a ton, seriously, like 1/4 cup), soy sauce, brown sugar (just a pinch), and … get this … the secret ingredient to virtually all my recipes … liquid smoke.

 

Set the crock pot for 8 hours, and you come home to this:

 

The recipe is based off of Sloppy Lentils from Fat Free Vegan, but we do not actually eat it in a sloppy joe form.  We ate it in bowls, with Ritz Crackers, and Will prefers to call this concoction Chili.  He actually ate some of it, with a lot of coaxing.

Wednesday 31 October

Halloween!

  

The red sunglasses and jaunty cap might look like a Halloween costume, but really, it was just what I wore to walk to work. The festive witch hat helped liven things up a few hours later when I was giving an exam to 350 students.

I had to work a little bit late (grading exams).  When I got home, we had leftover lentils for dinner and then went trick or treating.

Thursday 1 November

Too exhausted to run in the morning.  Slept in an extra hour and then got up and made Garlic Ginger Soup.  This was a little scary for me because all of the times I tried to consume ginger in an effort to calm my nausea when I was pregnant, and since ginger doesn't do a f*cking thing for hyperemesis, I just ended up throwing it up.  To this day, if there is a noticeable taste of ginger in anything that I eat, I instantly feel like I am 9 weeks pregnant and dying again.  Not fun.  But I decided to try the soup anyway, just with a drastically reduced amount of ginger.

To make the soup, I first cubed some tofu into tiny pieces and sautéed that with red pepper, garlic powder, and the tiniest smidgen of freshly grated ginger imaginable (I skipped the powdered ginger that the recipe called for).

Meanwhile, I heated up water in a pot and added some vegetable bullion cubes, unpeeled garlic cloves (I was confused about that aspect of it, but it ended up fine), the tiniest sliver of fresh ginger, soy sauce, lemon juice, and sriracha sauce.  I also cooked some rice noodles (real, actual rice noodles that I had gotten at an Asian market up on Olive Street).  I added everything together, and at some point I also added some chopped cilantro.

Then I put it all into a pyrex serving dish and stuck it in the fridge.  Doing all of this took a lot longer than I had, and I ended up having to (literally) run to work so that I wouldn't be egregiously late.  

All day long, I was looking forward to this soup, and when we finally sat down to dinner that night, it was the best thing I have ever tasted in my entire life.  (Rob will tell you I say that about a lot of foods.  But this time I really mean it, I swear).

I added a lot more sriracha to mine.  William refused to eat the soup, but he had some rice noodles with nutritional yeast on them.

Friday 2 November

Today.  It would have been my Grandma Florence's 97th birthday.  I thought about making some lemon sugar cookies or strawberry pie to honor her memory with the things she would want me to eat, but the reality is that I do not have time for any of that.

I ran this morning and then had to work a little bit late again.  When I got home, I made some whole wheat rotini and unthawed a few Avocado Pesto cubes.  Avocado pesto is another favorite of mine based on a recipe from PBB.

Basically, you take a ton of basil, avocado, garlic, lemon juice, pine nuts (I do not use pistachios like they call for in the recipe), cumin, olive oil, and sea salt, and you puree it in the food processor.

I like to keep this stuff on hand, so I make a big batch and then freeze it in cubes.  On nights like tonight, I can thaw about 4-5 cubes to put on our pasta.

 

Before I tried Garlic Ginger Soup earlier in the week, Avocado Pesto was my all-time favorite meal, ever.  It still ranks as a very high second.  Okay, maybe a tie.  Unfortunately, Rob doesn't like Avocado Pesto as much as I do, but he usually endures it.  I even got Will to eat some of this tonight, although it required a lot of bribing.  Still, it was a huge victory.  Massive.  Add in his consumption of lentils earlier in the week, and I am over the moon.

And so that's a week of vegan dinners, more or less. No iceberg lettuce to be found. Thanks for reading.

Last ditch attempt

Everything in my life seems to be perpetually falling apart.  I'm not sure if it has always been that way or if it is just since we moved to St. Louis.  Probably the latter.  I recently read through some of my first blog, from the year we spent living in Nicaragua when I was doing my dissertation research, and I realized that I actually used to be a happy person.  What happened?  Hyperemesis.  Finishing my dissertation but then walking away from the thing I'd spent 8 years working towards.  Our Urbana house explosion.  St. Louis.  

But mainly St. Louis.  It is easier to blame this on a place.

For about the first four months we lived here, things were okay.  It was exciting to have a job, and my coworkers were nice.  I no longer spent every minute of the day completely terrified that something would happen to Rob and I would have no way to support my child.  But then we had that house thing happen in Urbana, and everything got really awful for a while.  St. Louis no longer seemed promising.  Nothing seemed promising.  

I began, either consciously or subconsciously, to look for an Exit Strategy.

The form that my grief took was to write a book.  Just do it.  The thing that everybody in my life has spent my entire life telling me to Just Do.

I don't know what I was hoping to accomplish.  I didn't necessarily think of money as being the goal, but it would have been nice if we could have both quit our jobs and picked up and moved to Eugene, OR.  Why Eugene?  Because it is a place (I am told) that is so liberal, Rob and I would be considered "just right of center."  It seems pretty good compared to Missouri.

The book didn't pan out.  Maybe I can write and I just don't have what it takes to succeed the publishing industry.  Or maybe I can't even write.  It's really hard to say.

I'm exhausted.  I just can't put any more energy into it.

A couple of weeks ago, the NGO I was loosely involved with when I did my research in Nicaragua contacted me and asked if I would teach a primatological field course during the winter session this year.  At first I said there was no way.  

But then I took a good look around me and saw how much I don't belong in St. Louis.  I emailed them back and said I'd move heaven and earth to do it.

It would have involved planning and designing the course during the nights and weekends, then maxing out on all my vacation days for the entire year to take off enough time to go down there and teach it.  Rob was going to come with me and bring Will, of course.  I started getting excited for Will to learn Spanish.  To be wild and free and swim in Lake Nicaragua and watch monkeys with me in the forest.

It was only going to be 3 weeks, but maybe that would be enough.  Just enough of an exit to give me the energy to keep on doing this for a little bit more.  Maybe I could get a trumpet for Eduardo and bring it to him.  He wants to go to a university in Rivas and study music.  He wants to start his own mariachi band.

But then the whole thing fell through.  These things happen.  I got the news while I was at work, and I had to close my office door for a while.

It wouldn't be quite so bad if I thought I was going to be able to go to Fuego y Agua with Rob in February.  Oh yes, he's running it again.  But when I tossed out the idea to my coworkers, there was some grimacing.  It would have been much easier to have me gone, even for 3 weeks, over semester break.  Taking a whole week off in February, during the semester, is problematic for everyone.  They put up with it last year for me.  It was kind of a one-shot thing.

And so.

Eduardo isn't getting the money I send him every month.  I'd worked out this deal.  It seemed okay, but that fell through too.  He emailed me and told me the money didn't matter to him.  He'll always think of us as his North American family.  Of me as his Mama Meli.

And meanwhile, I'm still stuck in St. Louis.  Not sure what I'm doing here.

I decided I needed to pull myself together.  To put in one last ditch attempt to stop feeling toxic in my own skin.  

And now is the point at which I actually begin writing about what I intended to when I began this post.

Juice.

Yes.  You read that right.  Juice.

For a really long time, I'd been thinking about getting a juicer and doing a juice fast.  I mean, I'm a vegan, so it's kind of the next step-- right?  I finally took the plunge and did it.  Well, at least I bought the juicer.  It's a nice one.  A Breville Compact that I got refurbished for only $69.  And I bought the fruits and vegetables, a ton of them.  They didn't even all fit in the fridge.

I was so excited.  I just wanted to feel clean and clear-headed.  But what I found out is that I don't actually like juice.  

In particular, I don't like green juice, which is the juice you're supposed to rely on while fasting.  It all goes back to kale.  The first food that made me sick when I had hyperemesis.  I still can't eat it.  One of my main motives for buying the juicer was that I thought I'd be able to consume kale if it were in juice form.  The texture is what bothers me, not the taste so much, or so I thought.

It turns out, it is the taste that bothers me.  And juiced kale tastes about as good as, well, you'd imagine.

Of course you mix it with other things (like celery, cucumbers, apples, etc), but that just makes the other things taste bad.

About 22 hours into the juice fast, I was on the floor writhing in nausea, and I thought, okay, this is not working.  Most people who juice fast probably don't have such strong aversions to kale, and they probably aren't running 5 miles a day in preparation for some as of yet undecided ultra marathon.

So I gave it up.  My last ditch attempt to get my shit together.  I'm not sure where to go from here.

On the plus side, I've gotten Will to drink fun things like carrot-mango-orange juice.  I'd been hoping to sneak some leafy greens in him this way, but the kid knows better than to try anything that contains kale.

I've got no more Exit Strategies up my sleeve.  So, I run.  At some point on this blog I think I said that I run because I need the feeling of pushing myself into a deep, dark, scary place and then finding my way out.  But maybe that's not really why I do it, at least not all the time.  Maybe I run like this because I can't really run away.

Thanks for reading.

Dear William (33 months)

Dear William,

Today you are 33 months old!

What a fun month you have had.

You dressed up in silly hats:

 

 

You had a picnic with your dad:

You stole mommy's trekking poles during a hike:

We went to a fun playground and you said, "OH THANK YOU, MOMMY. THIS IS AWESOME!"

Afterwards we went out to lunch together as a family, for the first time ever. You had a kids' meal, and you actually ate most of it (rice and beans at Chipotle).

You read Hop on Pop (this is long, but cute…)

Your cousin Logan sent you his old tricycle

You got your very own sleeping bag, and we went on a little camping trip to a friend's farm in rural Missouri:

We had a rainstorm and you got to carry your very own umbrella:

You planted a garden at daycare, but mainly you just banged your trowel against a watering can:

You had a special night out with Mommy. Just the two of us had dinner at a restaurant together! You ate rice and beans like a pro at Chipotle (again)!

You danced up a storm at the MoPro bike race series:

We had such a great time together this month, William! I can't wait for all the fun things in store for us!

Love,

Your mom

Dear William (Things that are great about you)

I started writing this List of Things About William That Are Great back in October, but I never got around to finishing it, so I never posted it on the blog.  I came across it just now and it made me nostalgic in both a happy and sad sort of way... He's outgrown some of these things already.  I guess it is time to post this one and then start a new list.

 

Dear William,

While I am thinking about it, I just wanted to write down some Things That Are Great About You so that I remember them always.

-- The funny face you make when I am trying (largely unsuccessfully) to brush your teeth.

-- How you stand up at the baby gate and watch me make dinner.

-- How you put your arms around me when I am rocking you to sleep.

-- How you smile at me and say "mama" sometimes.  I think you might actually realize that mama is my name.  Though you are equally likely to smile at me and say "dada" or "tata."

-- The way your voice sounds when you say "Uh oh"

-- The way you try to feed us your food.

-- The sound of your laughter.

-- How cute you look in a hat.

-- The way you open your mouth really big to take a bite out of a banana.

--You were even great that time you were sick and sleeping in bed with us and woke me up in the middle of the night by puking on my face.

Dear William (25 Things About You)

Will's daycare is making a collage or something, and they sent us home with a card that has his picture on it and we're supposed to write down 25 things about him on that card.  Rob said, "This is really more of your kind of thing," (so true) and handed the card off to me.

It is probably good that I had to sit down and write 25 Things About William because we had a pretty rough day yesterday, and I needed to take a minute and remember how wonderful he is.  Will loves to throw things, which is great if they are lightweight or are meant to be thrown... not so great if they are hard and hit you in the face.  He was sitting next to me on the couch yesterday reading and talking on his (toy) cell phone, [Will loves to sit on the couch] when all of a sudden he hauled off and threw his cell phone at me.  It hit me right on the brow ridge (superciliary arch, for the anthropologists) and somehow then ricocheted to the bridge of my nose.  You know how in cartoons when a character gets hit in the head with something, they show stars or little tweeting birds circling the head? I think that actually happened.  Jebus, it hurt.  I screamed in pain and then couldn't talk; all the while, William sat there on the couch, laughing.  It continued to hurt really bad for the rest of the day, and now it still hurts more than 24 hours later.  My nose is actually worse than my brow ridge, and I am kind of worried it is broken.  The bridge of my nose is swollen and red (what a sight that is), and hurts to touch.  Come to think of it, it kind of hurts to breathe too.  I tried to blow my  nose earlier in the day, and was that ever a mistake.  I hope that I do not have to sneeze any time soon.  So, I wonder what happens to you if you have a broken nose?  And in particular, if you do not seek any medical treatment for said broken nose.  It's not like they would put a cast on it... would they?  I hope I don't end up with a crooked nose as a result of this incident.

Anyway, I figured as long as I am coming up with 25 Things About William, I might as well put it on the blog.  So here goes.

Dear William,

1. You have beautiful blue eyes (the color of Lake Nicaragua)

2. You have ticklish knees

3. Your favorite food is rice and beans

4. You love vanilla soymilk

5. You love to eat Clif Bars.

6. You love to read

7. You love to sit on the couch between your mama and daddy

8. You give great hugs

9. You can be very stubborn (like your mama)

10. You can go from happy to mad in 1 second!

11. You love to wear your shoes

12. You like going on walks

13. You like to stack blocks and knock them over too!

14. You get very excited to eat your favorite foods

15. You love pushing things with wheels (wagon, cart, tricycle)

16. You like to play ball

17. You can be very silly

18. You like to throw things

19. You like to make noise

20. You lovepeek-a-boo

21. You like to Hop on Pop

22. You can find your nose

23. You LOVEto dance

24. You look like your daddy

25. You love to go to daycare!

 

Dear William (17 months)

Dear William,

Today you are 17 months old.  You are such a fun age.  And you keep getting funner each day.  You are very sturdy, walking around on your little legs and playing with your toys.  Oh, do you ever love toys.

We had Christmas this past month, and you got many toys and lovely things from your relatives.

 

You play with blocks.  You like to stack your blocks.  Sometimes daddy builds elaborate things with your blocks, and then you come along and demolish them.

 

You have a toy cell phone, and you like to hold it up to your ear and babble.  When you are done with your conversation, you say, "Bye bye" and put the phone away (or drop it).

You love reading.  You love all your little books so much.  You just love turning the pages.  You love to sit in my lap or daddy's lap and read your books.  Sometimes when we are reading the book Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed, you get so excited that you stand up and jump too.  Well, you stand up and alternately bend and straighten your legs, without your feet ever leaving the ground.  But it is pretty close to jumping.  I have no idea where you picked that up.  I never jumped or imitated jumping when reading the book to you.  It's like you just suddenly knew what the word "jump" meant.

Along those lines, you understand things very well.  All I have to do is say, "William, do you want to nurse?" and you immediately stop whatever it is you are doing and zoom over to me, with a gigantic grin on your face. Hm, I guess you aren't ready to quit nursing then, are you? We'll see if we can keep it up.

You still love music and singing.  You love singing The Wheels on the Bus. Sometimes when daddy and I are singing to you, you begin to dance.  Your daycare teachers told us that one day they had music on during lunch time, and you got up from the table, went to the middle of the room, and danced.  You are a riot.

You really like to be independent, and you try very hard to feed yourself. You are getting pretty good with handling a spoon-- particularly if I pre-load it with food.  You like to try to dip your spoon in a bowl of food and eat all by yourself, but you haven't quite gotten the hang of it.  It won't be long though.  You tried raisins this month and you loved them.  Your favorite food is still rice and beans.  You are also quite fond of blueberries.

Well, William, I guess I need to sign off for now and get the kitchen cleaned up and fold some laundry.

Much love,

Mom

 

Dear William (14 months)

Dear William,

Today you are 14 months old. You have learned a lot of new things this month. For example, you can now pick your nose. You find that hilarious. But your biggest new thing is waving. For many months you have been doing a 2-handed wave, which was really more like clapping than waving per se, but this past month you have started waving for real. You wave all the time, like crazy. You wave at me first thing in the morning when you wake up. You wave as I lay you down in your bed at night. You giggle and wave at the baby in the mirror.

Your dad claims that you have begun stacking blocks, but I have yet to see it. Just tonight, we were playing blocks, and you enjoyed banging them together and taking them in and out of a box, but there was no stacking. I think maybe your dad may have "helped" a little in this picture he took:

You have become an expert hugger. You always underfoot, standing and hugging me about the knees. When I pick you up, you wrap your arms around me in a big ole hug. It is so sweet. You also make your preference known as to who you want to hold you. For example, if your dad is holding you and you decide you want me, you hurl your body in my direction, while reaching your arms out.

For most of the month, the entire family unit has been sick, and that hasn't been fun. First, you got sick (presumably from daycare), and then I got sick (presumably from you), and then your dad got sick. It just keeps lingering. You haven't been sleeping very well, probably because your nose has been stuffed up. You haven't slept through the night in a very long time. Usually you wake up at some point in the night and I cannot get you to stop crying and go back to sleep unless I bring you to bed with me. You like to stretch out in the big bed with mom and dad. I don't like being woken up in the night, but I do like curling up with you in bed. One night the only way you would sleep was with your head on my throat. It was kind of uncomfortable for me, but to tell you the truth, I didn't mind. Now that I am gone at work all day, I don't get to see you as much, and I miss you a lot. Maybe you miss me too, and that is why you are waking up in the night and insisting on sleeping with your head on my throat.

We Broke Vegan this month, William. It just got too hard to keep you vegan at daycare. So finally I just gave up and said, fine, give him Nilla Wafers (they contain milk). And then I said, alright, he can have a cheese sandwich. And yogurt, of the non-vegan variety. It has been very hard for me to deal with. I've tried to give you the best, most healthiest foods your whole life. But the past several months, it has been so hard to get you to eat anything, that I've just run out of options. The irony is, you don't really go for the non-vegan things either. Well, you'll eat Nilla Wafers or crackers that contain milk protein, but you won't touch cheese or anything blatantly non-vegan. I don't blame you. Dairy is disgusting.

Speaking of vanilla wafers, though, I found some organic vegan ones at the store and got them the other day. Last night after dinner, we were all eating some, and you got this crazy idea to "feed" some to your dad and me. It was so cute. We would open our mouths and you would giggle and feed us each a cookie. You're great.

Love always,

Mom

Retraction

I retract my last entry. Today I questioned them about the Cheez-Its, and they said no, he had not eaten them. He had pretzels instead. It was a mistake that they had written Cheez-Its in his daily information sheet (I hadn't noticed that it said Cheez-Its until I was on my way home); the other children were having Cheez-Its, but William was having pretzels.

They did call me this afternoon, kind of nervous and apologetic sounding, to tell me that he had accidentally gotten ahold of some Nilla Wafers at snack time. (Nilla Wafers contain milk protein). I told them thanks for letting me know.

It's a good day care, really. It is the best we could ever hope for. Well, it ought to be. It costs an arm and a leg and at least one kidney to send him there. It is the kind of place where parents send their kids so that they can build up a "portfolio" and get into a private school and then go on to an ivy league college, where they will graduate and get some high-paying crappy job in order to pay off their student loans. I feel way out of my element. But the staff is so nice, super nice. I really like them. And there are a lot of perks. They're very flexible and understanding about dietary issues (despite my complaint yesterday); they even do cloth diapers. They call me over every little thing (in fact, I can generally expect at least one call every day, just to update me on something). And they send almost daily emails with photos of what Will is doing. It's really nice. If I have to send my kid somewhere, I'm glad it's there.

Today, Will seemed to enjoy "story time," after going for a buggy ride. When I arrived to pick him up, they were listening to the Beatles, which is his favorite group.

I want him to stay pure and healthy and vegan, but also, it breaks my heart if he wants a Nilla Wafer but can't have it because it has milk protein in it.

Evaluating my priorities. Deciding which battles to fight.

What's a vegan mother to do

They gave him cheez-its at daycare today.

Livid.

Dear William (13 months)

Dear William,

Today you are 13 months old! Lucky 13!

Your whole life changed in just about every possible way this past month. It has been rough on us all, but for the most part you are taking it in stride. Well, almost in stride. You are standing up now, but not quite walking. You do love standing though. When you wake up in the mornings, first thing you do is stand up in your crib and holler for me. You smile when I come into the room.

William, we moved to Missouri this month. That is a brand new state for you. The whole thing was a bit stressful. We lived in an extended stay hotel for 2 weeks before we could get into our new place. (The extended stay hotel was where you first started standing).

I started a new job this month. For the first 2 weeks, your dad took care of you. Then your new daycare opened and you started going there. So far you like it I guess. I had been worried about how you would ever take a nap there (for me you only nap if you are nursing or if we go for a walk in the stroller), but your "teachers" somehow got you to sleep on a cot. They even took a picture to prove it.

You got sent home from daycare on your second day. They said you were acting fussy (you, fussy? Imagine that!) and they took your temperature and it was 99.5 (which is nothing, but they had to send you home). I don't know why you had a fever. You have never before in your entire life had a fever. I think maybe you were stressed from all the major upheavals in your life during this past month, or maybe you were teething. At any rate, you seemed to feel better the next day.

Speaking of teething though, you've gotten another tooth. You're up to 8 teeth now. It's your bottom lateral incisor. It wouldn't surprise me if you're also working on some molars too. Just please, no more fevers or any other type of illness. Not only does it scare the liver out of me if you are ever sick, but also, I cannot technically take time off work to take care of you for the first 6 months of my employment :(

You're nursing less than ever. Usually just twice a day (well, except for today, when I think you've nursed 5 times so far, but it's a weekend and your 13th month birthday besides). You are eating better, at least some of the time. You eat rice and beans sometimes. And sliced grapes. And plenty of sunflower butter and wheat bread.

You love playing with your Fridge Farm, and you've had a renewed interest in Blue Seahorse (see above picture of you napping in your cot). Other favorite activities of yours include crawling over to me, pulling up on my legs, and biting my knees.

You still cry a lot. In fact, you are crying now, maybe because you want me to stop typing and hold you. Guess I'd better go.

Love you,

Mama

Standing

We're back in St. Louis for week 2 of this thing, after a brief hiatus to Peoria/Lacon for my grandma's funeral. My mother and aunt had asked me to read the piece I wrote about Grandma at the funeral, so I did. People said so many nice things to me about it and about my grandma, and I really appreciate it. But still. If I'd been making a list of Things I Thought I Would Never Do, giving the eulogy at my Grandma's funeral would have been right up there at the top. The good thing about reading a eulogy (especially one you've written yourself) is that because it is at a funeral, no one thinks twice about it if you pass out or burst into tears during the reading. Luckily, I managed to do only one of those things.

Last night after we got back to St. Louis, it was quite a struggle to put Will to bed. He was very tired and fussy, but he would not stop crying. Our previous method (the one that had been working for the last several days) of putting him into his pack and play with Blue Seahorse until he fell asleep on his own was just not cutting it. About the umpteenth time I set him in the pack and play, he grabbed onto the sides of it and stood up. Now, I know your kid has been standing since he/she was 7 months old, but this was the very first time Will has ever stood up on his own. Unfortunately, he wasn't very happy about it. Oh with the screaming. My frustration with his screaming/crying was momentarily overshadowed by the fact that because he was standing, there was hope that he might someday walk.

Last night Will was a wild man

He never did sleep in his pack and play last night. He slept in the big bed between Rob and me, which meant that I didn't get much sleep at all (I can never really sleep when Will is in bed with us). Tonight it went a little bit better. There was a fair amount of crying and standing as I put him down, but he eventually started to play with Seahorse, and after a while of that, he did fall asleep. Keeping my fingers crossed that he stays asleep.

He went over 12 hours without nursing today. For the first time ever. I can't believe it. He nursed this morning when he woke up and not again until tonight right before bed. We've come a long way. It was only a month ago that he was still nursing pretty much all day every day. I guess I am supposed to be happy about this weaning thing, but it makes me uneasy. Like, it won't be long before he is grown up and living on his own and married to some girl I probably won't like and doesn't call me often enough. I just want to hold him and love him forever.

He's been eating a little bit better this past week or so, for the most part. He ate rice and beans for dinner at least 2 nights last week, which thrilled me to no end. He ate some organic blueberry waffles at my mom and dad's house over the weekend. I also gave him his first ever non-vegan food: a sugar cookie. I decided to just go for it. After Grandma's funeral, the ladies of the church served cookies and lemonade, and I knew that Grandma would want Will to have a sugar cookie. So I gave it to him, and he loved it. I had a bite of it too, so I guess I'm not 100% vegan either. Once we get into our new house, I'll make vegan sugar cookies for us, and I will add lemon to them.

Thanks for reading.

Dear William (12 months)

Dear William,

Today you are 12 months old. That is a whole year! Happy birthday!

The past month has seen a lot of changes in all our lives. It all started out when I had a job interview at Washington University, was offered the position, and accepted it. William, we are moving to St. Louis!

We have all been under a lot of stress the last month as we are preparing for the big move. You have been hanging in there and putting up with us as best you can, but at times it does get difficult.

You got another new tooth this month! You're up to 7 teeth now!

The biggest news is that you started crawling this month. You've been quite mobile for a while--scooting around every which way but forward. And then one day (July 31 to be exact), you just got up on your hands and knees and crawled. You were going after your dad's Nalgene bottle. I was upstairs packing some boxes, and I missed the whole thing. But luckily, you were thrilled with your new skill and kept crawling more and more throughout the coming days. You were a bit clumsy at first, but you kept getting better and better.

This month, you've also started pulling up on your knees, or on one knee and one foot.

You've still been a very fussy eater. You pretty much only eat bread and fruit. William, that is all well and good, but you need to start eating your vegetables again. You just won't eat much of anything off of a spoon. You push my hand away from your face and vocalize quite forcefully if I come at you with food on a spoon. About the only thing I can sometimes spoon feed you is vegan yogurt. I mix your vegan yogurt with sunflower seed butter so that it's more substantial. For lunch most of the time, you have your very own "sandwich"-- I spread hummus on a slice of bread and cut it into small pieces for you. Sometimes you love kiwi or peaches or mango or banana, but other times you refuse any of those things. You have developed this horrible habit of throwing your food on the floor if it displeases you (and it just about always displeases you). I've tried to give you soymilk or apple juice in numerous types of sippy cups, but most of the time you just hurl them across the room. Sometimes you won't eat a single bit of anything at a meal. It is very, very frustrating.

You have plenty of words, but you do not talk yet. For many months, you have said, "Ba ba ba ba," "Da da da da" and "Ma ma ma ma." But they are really just sounds; I don't think you attach any meaning to them. The other day though, you were in your high chair (refusing to eat), and I went in to the kitchen to try to come up with some other food that you might want, and when I went out of your line of sight, you craned your neck and said, "Ma ma ma ma." I sort of almost wondered you knew what you were saying.

We had a party for you the weekend before your birthday. You had a blast. You didn't like your cake though. It was a chocolate cake. The same kind of cake I baked when I was in labor with you. I couldn't believe that you didn't like it. Your dad got you to eat some the next day for lunch, but you haven't had any more since.

William, we have been through so much together this past year. I will never, ever forget the moment you were born, the moment I first laid eyes on you. I will never forget that feeling of absolute familiarity, like I had known you forever even though we had just met. I remember how I couldn't go to sleep, couldn't even close my eyes, because I couldn't stop looking at you. William, I love you so much that sometimes it seems like I can't contain all that love inside me. How could I? There's not enough room in the whole universe to contain how much I love you.

Happy birthday, William.