Winter Weather Cookies

My mother and I have a fondness for ginger bread cookies...or, maybe it's just me and she plays along. Whatever the case may be, when she comes to visit during late Fall/early Winter we always end up making/buying gingery items. This time around those cookies you buy in a tube were on sale, so we bought 2 rolls of gingerbread goodness and they sat in my fridge and sat and sat and sat...all throughout the Holidays until her last day here. I mean I meant to make them for Thanksgiving or for school. I meant to buy all that icing and crap so we could decorate them. I meant to...yada, yada, yada.

You see we had a two week Christmas break, which is usually par for the course (actually if we don't get two weeks we usually get pretty upset and kids start missing lots of school and so on and so on...), but then we added on three, yes, three, extra days because of snow. There was so much snow and muck that we had to reschedule my mother's flight...twice.

So, on the day we were supposed to leave, I opened the refrigerator door saw the cookies and thought...those would be great to make to go with lunch and on our trip to and from St. Louis. 

So we started out with the cookie dough. Lila helped me roll it out and make it into Gingerbread men...um, you can't have Gingerbread Cookies unless they look like men and women, so you can eat their heads and limbs off before tackling their delicious torsos (hmm...maybe I watch too much "Dexter").

We still didn't have the icing and stuffs so I was trying to figure out a way to make them tasty and delicious. Enter this recipe...I obviously didn't make the gluten free Molasses cookies (for another day, perhaps), but I did make the every so amazing, like I want to slather it on my face right now, salted caramel goodness. It's ingredients are simple: brown sugar, butter, cream cheese, salt. Note to you: when it says it firms up if you let it sit, what she means is like OVER NIGHT, not in a few minutes, or hours.

Modern Day cookbook: Chromebook in the kitchen.

The kiddo helped me put them on the pan and we baked about 24 of them.

She also helped by licking the salted caramel yumminess off of the spatula. "Hey Mommy, did you know this has a cupcake on one side and sprinkles on the other? I'm going to eat the cupcake side first."

Then we put the salted caramel in thick layers in between two cookies and then we ate the crap out of them.  She's putting her pinkies up so she can be 'danity' (say with a British accent), at least that's what she told me. I don't know where she gets her ideas sometimes *whistles, backs away* Um, yeah, we also got dressed...sure it was lunch time, but we also knew we had a long, long, long car ride (thanks Chris for driving) ahead of us...on roads that were still an icy mess. Ugh.

The kiddo also learned that when you leave the food on your chair the kittens swat it down (they're still in training  and it was too cold for them to be outside) and eat it. It was a sad lesson, but, um, did any of you know that cats like gingerbread and cream cheese salted caramel? I took this picture before throwing away what was left of the cookie and banishing the kittens (Lizzie and Katie) to their room.

Entertaining Travel Reads

          As I plan several flights this summer I've been thinking about how to occupy the mind of a 20 month old on a plane full of people. At home, when she's bored I just pop on the TV, turn on the music or throw the bag of blocks all over the living room floor...these are not viable options on plane, as she doesn't use headphones yet, and for those of you who think these options are ideal (and, you know who you are...) shame on you as I'm not really in the market for annoying others on the plane, nor do I like the idea of treating the whole plane as my personal living room, as I am not so far removed from being on the other end of that experience. I remember quite clearly a mother and companion and three little people who sat in that space at the front of the plane (where there's leg room) and had crayons, markers, blocks, noisy toys et cetera all over the floor even as the plane landed and people wanted to get off the plane...not cool.
          To me, the easiest way to entertain a tiny tot is to give them books, one at a time. 1] Books are quiet, even if the tiny tot in question wants you to read the book you can read it to them at conversation level or a whisper (much quieter than a noisy toy). 2] Books are not messy, your tiny person cannot write with the book, sure, they can write on the book, but that's only if you give them a writing utensil. 3] Books are small and can be easily packed into your childs carry-on.

Here are some books that I recommend as ideal travel reads:

• Baby Einstein Cats by Julie Aigner-Clark It's a tiny board book that fits easily into any compartment of a carry-on, or in a pocket. You're kid can eat it or bend it and if he/she wants you to read it, it's short and easy. This is a cat. Cats are warm and soft to hold.
• I'll Teach My Dog A Lot of Words by Michael Frith Again, it's a board book, not as small Cats (but, I'm guessing you'll be hard-pressed to find many other books as small as Cats) and I can attest to the fact that it's really easy to read on the plane and can be acted out with little to no interruptions to other passengers (it's all in the voice and the eyes). My kidlet likes to read this to herself and that's...well, it's nice. The first words I will teach my pup are dig a hole and fill it up.
• Duck and Goose Find a Pumpkin by Tad Hills This is a lovely interactive book where Duck and Goose ask questions about where to find a pumpkin, most of the answers are "No" and your kiddo can catch on pretty quickly and answer. Trust me it's fun. I hear there are other books in the series, but this is the only one we know by heart! "Is the pumpkin in the leaf pile, Duck?" "No."
• Baby Einstein My First Book of Numbers by Julie Aigner-Clark The tiny person can be entertained for hours by this book. Seriously...there's counting, there's colors, there's rubber ducks and marbles and flowers and bees, there's pictures of little people. This book is really big though, so big that when I've taken it on trips, it's been one of two books I take (and the other is usually a squishy bathbook like Seahorse or, a small board book like, um, Cats--can you tell what book my kiddo really likes?!) If you start with three and add one more, did you know you have the number four? Just draw a triangle and add a little line for a number four that looks just fine.
• Seaside Bath Books-Seahorse by Julie Clough We bought this book at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and then spent the 8 hr. train ride home being entertained by it. It has a squeaker, but so far Lila can't squeak it, which is fine by me! Sally the Seahorse love to dance.

And, finally...

• Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr. An oldie, but goodie it seems that everyone knows this story. Lila likes to guess what's coming up next, she likes to label the colors and label the animals. This takes a book that might take 5 minutes to read about 15 minutes of entertaining reading and communication. Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? I see a red bird looking at me.

Whatever books you choose, reading with your tiny tot while traveling can be loads of fun! What kinds of books do you like to read while traveling?

Twist Your Noodle...

"In our new knowledge economy, if you haven't learned how to learn, you'll have a hard time."
---Peter Drucker

         So far my kid loves to read...no seriously, she does. If there are toys on the floor and a pile of books, she picks the books. She'll grab one of the books and hand it to me, nodding her head, while quietly and passionately saying, "Yes, yes". We read to her at night and well, frankly anytime she wants. She loves books that have animals, and Seussian sentence structures and princesses...I can't wait until she starts reading the Serendipity books. We watch "Super Why" where you learn that if you have a problem you 'look in a book'. This genius cartoon teaches theme, rhyming patterns, spelling, phonetics and has caused my kidlet to sing, "ABCDEFG" over and over...I know she doesn't know that these are letters, but isn't it a start?
          I don't know how to keep this passion for books going, I don't remember not loving books, nor do I remember ever being told to read, so I don't know how to fan the flames. My mother read to us at night, something from the Bible and then something that we wanted like a chapter from the Laura books, "The Purple Pussycat" (Kim's favorite), "Popcorn" "Sheldon's Lunch" et cetera. On the rare occassion that I got in trouble and was told to go to my room, my mother would say, "No radio, and no reading". For as long as I can remember I have had a book in hand, in brain and/or in head. There was one night, just a couple of weeks ago, that the my whole tiny family was reading. Lila with her books on the floor, Chris with his Nook and me with my book. No television, just books and the occasional grunt of happiness...over books. We do this often.
            The men we have married are readers, sure it's non-fiction, sports books, man magazines or, in the case of my husband, "The Grumpus Under the Stairs"...a book he still wishes he had, by the way...a book that I can't find for sale under $100, but it's still reading. In our different ways, all three of us girls have become avid readers...sure Kim reads boring books like the manual to my car and Marissa reads scary books or VC Andrews, but we are ALL readers.
            Of course, my sisters and I had the same upbringing and, because we grew up in the world's smallest town, we had the same wonderful teachers, all of which did their very best to instill in us a love for reading. One teacher I remember especially, her name is Mrs. Coday, because she had a reading bathtub. It was one of those claw toed tubs that she painted some sort of obnoxious lime green and she had this tub sitting off to the side by the bookshelves. It wasn't attached to water or anything, there was no swimming involved, it was just an empty tub. But, during reading time (if you had been good) you and 2 or perhaps 3, I don't remember exactly, of your classmates got to sit in the tub and read. These times were the best times ever. In 5th grade, I got to be in the 8th grade-level reading class. Even then I understood that splitting kids up by their reading level and challenging them to read, at no matter what level, made them better readers. I understood this because my sister was in her grade-level class and she learned as much and had as much fun with reading as I did.
          We had Book-It goals (free pizza was way cool, Book-It was not tied to our passing our respective grade-level) and SSR, we did not have AR.
          In our own different ways, my sisters and I have figured out that reading is essential to life and understanding. We understand that the power to read and process information is stronger than monetary assets and we do not take this for granted.
          Being a high school teacher has also shown me the pitfalls of people who don't have a love for reading and I have also seen to what lengths students--smarts students--will go to NOT read (I can't even get all of my honors kids to read books in the summer--something I still assume every honors kid should just do by nature)...I do not want my kiddo to be one of these kids.
          How will I be able to make sure that my kiddo has teachers who instill in her a love of reading and how will I make sure that these teachers are more concerned with her learning than they are test scores and AR scores and MAP scores?
          How will I make sure that I teach my tiny person a love of reading without killing, in her, the joy of reading?



Happy Sparkly Halloween



Grandma (Nona) reading to Lila Jane



    

Christmas Sparkles

Ok, so my kiddo is really into sparkly things ("What 14 month old girl isn't?", I'm told. I'll just have to take everyones word for it). She is also a voracious reader...ok, ok, I know she doesn't really read, but she does point to words and babble and then looks over or up at me to make sure that I'm paying attention. She'll read a page, I'll read the whole book, she goes back to the pages that she likes, and, the pages that she goes back to always have sparkles and bright colors. Yesterday, I finally got out all the board books for the holidays and we started reading those...there's one about an angel, one about the baby Jesus that plays "Silent Night" and one about a special star...the one that she's most drawn to, however, is one that got into the pile on accident...it's called Happy Sparkling Halloween, and she can't get enough of it!!!

Happy Holidays Everyone!!!