Real food

Blogging twice in one day? Practically unheard of.
I have had food on my mind lately. Not because I am pregnant, although the baby has dropped and my stomach holds so much more now.
When Ashton first started eating solids, he would pretty much eat anything. Yup, up until 16 or so months (around the time he weaned himself) everything was fair game. Salmon, chicken, pork, turkey, not so much beef though. Any sort of bread product. Any non-green vegetable which included mostly root veggies (potato, sweet potato, yam, turnip, carrot), cauliflower, all fruits (except green ones). Nowadays he hates salmon, sometimes will reject chicken (not always), hates turnips, carrots and white potatoes (but if you cook them as oven fries, they are fine), still hates all green fruits and veggies (ie: kiwis, broccoli). I feel that we are sort of stuck in a rut for meals.
Breakfast: Unsweetened applesauce of some sort. If this isn't part of it, there is mutiny. Often we also do pancakes. I like to make them, freeze them and pop them in the toaster in the morning. We've bought the Eggo ones for days that homemade isn't there. Sometimes I make muffins and we do muffins. We've tried other things. Sometimes if it isn't a pancake, we get a scream and smash. Eggs are a no-go (except at dinner...odd?).
Lunch: We used to do sandwiches...bread, cheese, deli meat. Fruit for dessert and some yogurt. And then I decided that deli meat is nasty. So I discovered pork roast (again, beef roast wouldn't fly). It's so easy because you just cook it for a couple hours and then take it out and slice it in to deli-meat thickness. And it's a huge hit. So we like to mix up the food groups. Always cheese though as he won't drink milk. Sometimes crackers, pita, naan bread for the grains. He loves peanuts and those Ritz peanut butter cracker things so I figured that peanut butter would be a good option. I made a "pizza" using naan bread spread with peanut butter with some sliced up banana on top. He loves banana and he loves naan bread so he'd love this right? Nope...he slammed it and screamed and looked appalled.
Dinner: We try to give him stuff we eat. Biggest hits are a hash brown casserole and oddly a beef taco rice casserole that is slightly spicy. If we have a chili or tomato based thing or any other pasta that isn't macaroni, he's like "forget it".

Milestones and memories

This blog is becoming a place where I want to record ongoing memories and milestones of my children. I am finding it so odd that Ashton is growing so fast and I keep wondering "Will I remember this stage?" and I want to remember. Two nights ago, I was lying on the couch being pained by awful BH contractions and Ashton was standing at the coffee table with his dinosaur magazine. He was flipping through the pages and babbling to them and pointing to things and then nodding and turning to the next page, etc. He was so careful with the pages and just looked so grown up. He doesn't talk yet but he has words (Mom, Dad, yogurt, banana, bird, meow, moo, baaa, rawr, etc) but he sounded like he was talking with his magazine. I thought to myself, "Will I remember this moment when he was 22 months old and doing this?"
It is 11 days away from Camryn's due date and I have been thinking a lot to what Ashton was like as a baby. Ashton is still my baby but when she comes, I have been told that you realize that your firstborn is actually NOT a baby but a little boy in comparison to your second child.
One of my favourite memories of motherhood so far:
When Ashton was a couple months old and cranky, I would lie on the couch with my knees up and put him sitting so that his back was against my thighs and I would hold him steady and rock my knees back and forth and sing to him. I would sing Beatles songs like "In My Life" and "Blackbird" and he would stop crying as long as I kept rocking and singing. Before Ashton, I always thought that I would never sing to my kids. I'm musical, yeah but I don't sing. I pretend to sing a lot of the time at certain functions (when I was involved in Guiding for example). But here I am, a mom and I sing to my kid every day. I sang to him in the womb, I sing to him now. If he's grumpy now and I try and sing to him, he shakes his head "no" and screams at me and tries to swat me away. Singing is for happy occasions these days.

Anyway, Jesse has been taking Ashton to sportball for a couple weeks and I decided to go watch last week. It is so fun to watch! I am astounded at what my little man can do. I watched him kick a football off a cone, chase a hula hoop, play with a parachute. This week, it's hockey.