Tuesday I tried a new kind of baked tofu out on Wyatt: honey sesame. You’d think that would go over well, but he hated it and made a point of telling me when he got home. I’m having a bit of a baked tofu crisis. Trader Joe’s cut it’s baked tofu offerings from 3 flavors to one in the course of a week and when I went searching at Lucky (which used to have 5 or 6 flavors) they only had one kind too. Are all the baked tofu manufacturers suffering in the economy or something?? Anyway, I also sent a hot dog bun, cheesy crackers and grapes — all of which were eaten.

Yay! Summer is here! At least it is at the markets. Wednesday’s lunch had sweet, wonderful corn cut off the cob from dinner leftovers, cherries, a lemon ginger scone and some salami.

Thursday’s lunch marked the return of blueberries which are now, finally available at an affordable price. I also sent toasted pita wedges, a cheese stick and more salami.

Friday Wyatt agreed to having a sandwich in his lunch which he hasn’t approved of in ages. I made it exactly to his specifications: hambuger bun with salami — and only salami — inside. He also took blueberries and some grapes.

Have a great weekend!

May 21, 2009:  I was planning to make Zach a cake for his birthday, so I stopped at Spun Sugar to see if there was anything fun I could use to decorate it. I got a couple of things, but Zach decided he wanted strawberry shortcake for his birthday treat instead (um…yum!)  so I’ll be saving those for another time. This is a rack of sprinkles and colored sugar. Pretty, no?

May 22, 2009: For Zach’s 40th! birthday we got a rare night out without the kids. Aunt Erin and Uncle Bon-Bon came over to watch Augie and Wyatt and we headed over to the city to have dinner at Heaven’s Dog where Zach’s brother Charlie is one of the chefs. The restaurant features upscale Chinese food and has a killer bar with lots of interesting cocktails. Charlie treated us to a fabulous, excessive dinner. He told us he’d start by sending out a few appetizers for us to try and by “a few” he meant six (6)! There were chicken skewers, sticky rice packets, lettuce wraps and dumplings galore. By the time we’d finished sampling it all, we were full, but then Charlie insisted that we try four (4) different entrees. Yikes! As if that weren’t enough, he finished us off with three(3) different desserts. I won’t even mentioned how many cocktails came to our table. By the time we left, our bellies were distended and we still waddled out with a huge bag of leftovers.

The other fun part of the night was that Adam Savage from Mythbusters was there. You can see him in the photo above,  just over Zach’s cocktail. He’s the one with the blonde hair and the black jacket who isn’t a kid. We are huge Mythbusters fans and love to watch it with Wyatt, so it was pretty cool to see him in person.

May 23, 2009: Saturday we went down to Morgan Hill to visit our friend Allison and her family and all go to the Mushroom Mardi Gras. Here, Zach and Wyatt enjoy the tea cups ride.

May 24, 2009: I spent a good deal of the day on Sunday working on a sewing project. I’ll have a post on that later.

May 25, 2009: Our Memorial Day was absolutely thrilling. Zach works for a Canadian company, so he didn’t have the day off and everything was closed, so the boys and I hung out around the house most of the day and then hit the grocery store for our big outing in the afternoon. Overall our trip to the store was pretty disastrous. I had initially wanted to go to Costco, but didn’t realize it was closed for the holiday until I pulled into the parking lot. We went to Lucky instead which was fine, but when I got up to the check-out I realized I’d left my wallet at home. Zach zipped over to the store to bring it to me and was there within five minutes, but it was still a pain. Then, when I got home, I realized that I’d spent an hour and $160 shopping and I didn’t buy any frickin’ milk — which was the whole reason I’d gone to the store in the first place. My life really is pretty hard, isn’t it?

May 26, 2009: Ahhhhhhh! The first corn of the summer. You know I love the corn, right? I am an Iowa girl, after all. We’re getting all the good stuff now — corn, cherries, peaches. Heavenly!

May 27, 2009: What is my baby’s favorite toy? Why it’s our universal memory card reader!

A couple weeks ago, Heather requested a post with photos of Wyatt’s lunch boxes after he came home. Excellent idea! It was a bit tough to remember to take pictures of the lunches in the afternoons because I’m not in the habit like I am in the mornings, but I managed to get a photo every day. Yay me!

This was a pretty typical week for lunch consumption. Sometimes the lunches I pack go over really well and Wyatt eats everything. Sometimes a lunch will come home almost untouched. Typically though, there’s just one thing left in his bento and it often leaves me scratching my head, wondering why he didn’t eat that particular food.

Tuesday’s lunch had a bun stamped with food safe markers, two turkey meatballs cut into quarters and skewered, a monkey box full of catsup and a big hand full of grapes.

This is what was left in the lunch when it came home. The bun, which was pulled from the freezer and thawed, was pronounced “stale”. Guess those need to be toasted to be edible. I was surprised the grapes were all gone because often there are quite a few of those left.

Wednesday I sent left over rice from dinner the night before that I formed into rice balls using a mold, corn, strawberries and some salami.

OK, so lunch consumption was so-so today. He ate the strawberries and salami and it looks like he had two bites of the bear rice ball. He said he didn’t eat the corn because he “doesn’t like it when it’s cold.” Fair enough, but he used to like it so that’s new.

Thursday, Wyatt got leftover pork tenderloin from dinner the night before. I cut it into chunks and skewered it. This is is favorite dinner, so I expected it to go over well. I also put in strawberries, a banana chunk and some cheesy crackers for a little treat.

SCORE! I don’t often see completely empty lunch boxes..

After having such great success with Thursday’s lunch, I decided to copy it on Friday. We were out of pork, so I sent skewers of baked tofu instead. I also sent a mini blueberry muffin, another half banana and more strawberries.

They were out of the teriyaki tofu at TJ’s so I had to get the “savory” flavor instead. It obviously didn’t go over so well.

Did you guys like this? Or were you grossed out by looking at our garbage? If people like this, I might continue to take after photos from time to time.

May 14, 2009: Everybody loves babies until they attack!

May 15, 2009: Batman and the “real” Ninja! We had dinner at our friends’ house and the kids dressed up in costumes the whole night long. Wyatt brought his Batman costume along (I love the collar sticking out of the top. Hee!) and Little R wore her ninja costume. They kept telling us she was a “REAL ninja”. Maybe a ninja of cute-osity…

May 16, 2009: We spent most of Saturday working on the square foot garden boxes. We got both of the boxes assembled (mostly), but then we had to go to three different nurseries to get compost. The compost has been the biggest pain in the booty part of this project so far, I think.

May 17, 2009: Sunday, we mixed up the dirt (compost, peat moss and vermiculite), got it in the boxes and put the dividers on one of the boxes. We still need to get the dividers on the other box and plan out where we’re going to put everything, then we can start putting seeds and plants in the ground. I’ll be doing a whole post about this process when we’re all finished, so keep an eye out for it.

May 18, 2009: Oh yeah, baby! This is what I look like after the gym. The bandana is to keep the fly-away hair out of my eyes. It always makes me sing, “Paradise City” when I put it on though.

May 19, 2009: Oh yeah, baby! Look at our big boy pulling up on his mama. Augie is getting up on his knees all the time now and he’s even pulled himself up to standing two or three times. He likes to balance when he kneels, but he’s still pretty wobbly, so he falls and conks his head a lot. This face is quintessentially, Augie, by the way.

May 20, 2009: Notice a theme with Wyatt this week? He has had his Batman costume on for a good chunk of every day. We spend a lot of effort adding the word “bat” to the beginning of nouns when he’s in one of these phases and everyone in our family is a part of the game. August is Robin, I’m Batgirl and Zach is Alfred. He even wore his costume on a walk to the store with me. Man, is it ever cute when he does that! Everyone we pass comments on it (except the people with cold, dead hearts) which embarrasses him a little, but not enough to stop him from wearing it. Don’t you wish that you had something like that? An outfit that made you feel strong and invincible and happy?  I do.

May 7, 2009: This is a sampling of one day’s mail. I got a copy of Real Simple (yay!), High Five magazine (for Wyatt), a Sur La Table catalog, two identical Eddie Bauer catalogs (one for Wendy Thorpe and one for Wendy Copley), Netflix envelope with Scooby Doo Meets Batman inside, junk mail from the NRA (Free Knife!) and junk mail for my father-in-law.

May 8, 2009: Augie’s new ride. He’s almost grown out of his baby bucket, so I hauled out the Roundabout from the basement, cleaned it and we’ll be installing it in the car in the next few weeks. Once he’s out of the infant seat, we won’t be able to use the Snap ‘n Go stroller, so we needed to get a new one. (Wyatt’s old stroller was trashed so we couldn’t re-use it.) I researched strollers online for weeks to find strollers that met my criteria and had good reviews. I also took multiple trips to Target, Babies R Us and Rockridge Kids to test drive strollers and I finally settled on the MacLaren Quest. So far, I’m liking it a lot.

May 9, 2009: Wyatt has been making these really goofy faces when I take his photo for awhile now, so I’ve been begging him not to. This is him practicing a nice face.

May 10, 2009: Mother’s day! Here I am with my boys after brunch at Venezia.

May 11, 2009: Zach’s Mother’s Day present to me is some raised garden beds. We managed to get all the stuff at Home Depot, but not to get it all assembed. (My brother in law had our drill.) Here’s all the stuff, piled up in the back yard. We’ll do the assembly this weekend.

May 12, 2009: Augie rode in the shopping cart for the first time on a trip to Monterey Market. He loved it and spent the whole time laughing, shrieking and charming all the people who made eye contact with him by grinning big gummy grins.

May 13, 2009: We started sleep training this week and Tuesday night Augie spent the night in his crib for the first time ever. He slept straight through until 5:15 am, then I brought him into our bed to nurse. He conked out again right away and stayed asleep until 10:30! I don’t think he’s slept that much since he was a new born. Or maybe ever! His naps have extended to 2-3 hours too. It has been awesome.

You’ll notice an uptick in the cuteness of  Wyatt’s lunches this week. For a while there, I was just not feeling the whole cute bento thing, but this week I’m on a roll. (If I do say so myself…) And, you know, not feeling the whole cute bento thing — nothing wrong with that. I feel zero mommy guilt when I don’t do anything cutesy with Wyatt’s lunch.  None. Know why? Because I make my kid’s lunch bento-style for a lot of reasons — to encourage healthful eating, for the environment, as a tiny way to show my love for my child — but mostly I do it because I think it’s fun. If he likes it — that’s great. I do enjoy it when Wyatt gets excited about something I make him. But the fact is, I’m not going to beat my brains in — or even inconvenience myself — so a four-year-old can see a bunny in his lunch. If I’m not having fun with this, I’m not going to do it. That’s why you were seeing lots of buns, salami and piles of strawberries for the last couple months. I was going for the easy way to make lunches.

This week I was energized and I was feeling creative again. “Why the change of heart?” you ask. I’ll tell you:

Sleep-training

We sleep-trained Augie this week and he’s been sleeping and sleeping and not waking up a million times. And it was actually not too emotionally wrenching. Wyatt cried for up to two hours every time we put him down when we did this with him and it took 2 weeks before he finally went down with no crying. With Augie, it took two days. All this sleeping for Augie has meant lots more uninterrupted, wonderful, delicious sleep for me and now I’m feeling creative, inspired and energetic. Nothing like months and months of sleep deprivation to kill any creative impulse you have.

OK, enough rambling! Here are this weeks lunches. I hope I haven’t built them up too much. They’re not that exciting.

The main component of Tuesday’s lunch was alphabet noodles with butter and garlic. They went in the thermos. I also sent along a smaller bento box with some peas, grapes and letter cookies. We are working on some sight words to encourage Wyatt to read a bit, so I sent the letters C-A-T. Because I think every 4 year old should know how to spell “act”.

Tuesday night Zach and I went to the gym to work out and the kids went to the child care center. I packed Wyatt this bento for his dinner. He loooves it when I do this. He got a salami “rose” with a cheese stick chopped into chunks used as the center, two gigundo strawberries, the very first cherries of the season (they’re OK, not great), and a lemon ginger scone.

He kept calling the scone a “crust” and I had no idea what he was talking about. For some reason he can never remember the word “scone”. He kept saying, “Mom, I really want a crust in my dinner.” And I was thinking, “What in the heck of the world?? He wants me to pull crusts off bread and put them in? What is he — some kind of Dickensian orphan begging for some tepid water and a crust of bread?” He finally showed me the bag of scones and then it all made sense. Not a Dickensian orphan, but rather the son of yuppie food snobs. Yes, that makes more sense….

Wednesday he got another salami and string cheese rose, a bunch of strawberries (which are sooo good right now), and two little sandwiches made from flatbread and catsup. Yep. I find it gross too. He loves them. I also threw on a salami dude for extra cuteness.

I sent more cherries on Thursday. They’re doing a unit on ladybugs at school, so I tried to make one of the cherries look like a ladybug. I poked a couple of stems in it for antenae and I tried to draw on spots with a food marker, but the ink kept beading up, so it didn’t really work out. He also got some baked tofu. I cut one of the pieces into a bunny with a knife and then drew a face on it. Bunny snack mix rounds out the meal.

Friday’s lunch had some grapes and salami. It looks like there’s a ton of salami there, but it’s only 6 or 7 slices. Wyatt gave me explicit instructions not to cut the salami, so each slice is folded up a few times. There is also a cheese stick and a hot dog bun with red robots stamped on it. It’s kind of hard to see the robots in this photo, but you have to believe me when I tell you that they looked cool.