How to Have a Healthy Breakfast. Every Single Day.

The pattern tutorial isn't quite (at all) ready, so here is something I hope will be helpful to the internet at large.

Working with preschoolers, I have learned that if I don't have a good breakfast in the morning, I can't do my job well. I lose my temper when I'm hungry, and there is no one like a preschooler to push all the wrong buttons when they know you're on the edge. I can sacrifice a shower in the morning, but I am not allowed to leave the house without breakfast.

Then there's Kai. He is a preschooler, and he wakes up ravenous. He's never been much of a dinner eater- he gets most of his daily calories from breakfast, lunch, and snacks, so I try to be sure they're good ones.

I need fuel to power my Lego marathon!

The modern lifestyle pushes us more and more towards convenience foods, and it is hard to push back, especially when I work full time and have never been much of a morning person. It seems like life, and especially parenting, is a constant series of decisions about what principles you are going to stand firm on, and what you are willing to let go of. I've let go of the battle against the television, at least somewhat, but I haven't yet given up on trying to make sure we eat a healthy diet that is also somewhat friendlier towards the planet than the norm. I consider breakfast one of my big successes- every day, Kai and I eat a balanced meal made of fresh, nutritious foods, and I don't spend more than five minutes in the morning prepping it. Here's how I do it.

1. I have a pattern. 

Mornings are much easier if I don't have to think. So breakfast has a set pattern- whole grain carbohydrate, fruit, protein. That way, the questions I have to ask aren't huge- What am I making?- but simple- banana or blackberries? Here are some of the meals I serve regularly, and mix and match.

- Whole grain pancake with sunflower seed butter, banana. (This is Kai's very favorite breakfast and what he eats most days.)

- Plain yogurt with homemade granola, berries

- Whole grain French toast with all-fruit jelly, pear slices. 

- Oatmeal with raisins and applesauce, glass of milk.

- Homemade muffin, yogurt, apple slices.

- Whole grain toast with nut butter and bananas.

2. I plan ahead

You probably noticed the word "homemade" a few times up there. And no, I am not making a batch of muffins or pancakes on a school morning! Every weekend, I try to make at least one think that I can serve for breakfast during the week. A double batch of Sunday morning pancakes, an entire loaf of bread into French toast, or a batch of the banana muffins that Kai loves to help me make. I freeze these on cookie sheets and then bag them up, and I know by now exactly how long it takes to thaw them out. (One minute and fifteen seconds for one pancake). I always make sure to have fresh fruit on hand, and some frozen back ups too. 

Pancakes frozen and ready for bagging up.

I know a lot of what I serve for breakfast has a reputation for being unhealthy. I mean, we have pancakes, French toast, and muffins almost every day! The truth is, though, that these foods aren't by their nature actually unhealthy. It's the restaurant and pre-made versions that have ruined their reputation. I use only whole grain flour and bread, limited sweetener, limited fats, and almost always include fruits and vegetables in the recipes. I rarely serve them with syrup, but when I do, it's the real thing and the portions are small. I would much rather eat these than the alternatives- pop tarts, instant flavored oatmeal, granola bars, sugary cereal, etc.

I will add the recipes I use for weekend baking as I make them over the next few weeks- check back for links. 

3. I have a Plan B

I know me. Even five minutes is too much on that morning when I sleep through my alarm and spill coffee on the floor, and there's sometimes a Friday when the fruit has run out and I didn't make it to the store. For those days, I have a packaged alternative which I can feel okay about Kai eating every once in a while. Right now, my emergency backup breakfast is Kashi cereal bars and an applesauce pouch. A little more sugar than I like, a little more processed than I would want, but not a pop tart! And that's what really matters, right?

Some of you might be wondering what Guy eats- I haven't said much about him here. The fact is, I'm not home when he eats, so I don't really know!

So there it is! My plan for an easy, healthy breakfast, every day.

Here we go again!

I am rethinking what I would like to do with this blog. When I started, it was going to be a sewing blog, based solely on the fact that I had come up with a really fun name. Then I decided that was too much work and I was going to post book reviews and general parenting advice. I want to be a blogger who posts things that are important to me, that will help other people, and maybe bring in a little bit of income, and to do that, I need to be posting regularly. So here's what I will be doing, I think- I will post about once a week, on topics that are important to me- Sewing, nutrition, education, books. If I can't manage a big post, I'll put up a little something about what I've been reading.

Right now, I have an idea for a tutorial that I hope will be useful for a lot of beginner seamsters- how to read a pattern. I've started putting together the ideas and I'm hoping to post it next weekend. Stay tuned!

Cooking with Toddlers- Applesauce Bread

I have fond memories of making bread with my mom, way back in the day. She has a great picture of me in an enormous apron with my hands in a giant bowl, covered in flour, with the most serious look on my face. I think I was about three.

Kai will be three on his next birthday, and he loves to cook with me. And Saturday morning Guy decided to clean the entire kitchen before I woke up (husband of the year award? I think so!) so I decided to do some baking with Kai. Because nothing says "cook something" like a clean kitchen.

I first decided to make pear muffins.

Mmm, pears.

After all the pears were eaten, I decided to make butternut squash and applesauce muffins. Butternut squash is yummy too... and all of the muffin tins were in the dishwasher...

So, we ended up making applesauce bread with raisins.

More cinnamon!

Kai's favorite jobs are stirring, pouring, and shaking in the spices. I like my muffins and such on the flavorful side, so I'm pretty happy just handing him the spices and letting him shake away.

Stir, me hearties!

I wish that picture had turned out less blurry, but I love his expression so much that I'm posting it anyway. Note how the kitchen is getting progressively less clean in each picture...

Cooking with Kai is very frustrating and rewarding. Today he was naming all the ingredients as I got them out- he knows the spices, baking soda, baking powder, and he says "Egg! To crack-crack-crack!" But he wants to do more than he's completely capable of just yet, and I have to sneak behind his back to give the ingredients a good mix because he wants to do it All By Himself. He's developing a real sense of care and precision- I had to encourage him to really go for it with the spices. And of course...

Nom, nom, nom

The eating part is so much fun!

Applesauce Muffins/Bread (Adapted from Deceptively Delicious)

1 1/2 cups white whole wheat or whole wheat pastry flour
3/4 cup old-fashioned oats
1/4 cup ground flaxseed (or just add more oats)
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
Cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves to taste

1 1/4 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1 egg
2 tbsp oil
1 tbsp vanilla
1/4 cup raisins, soaked in hot water (reserve 1/4 cup of the water)

Preheat the oven to 400 (for muffins) or  350 (for bread).

Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Mix the wet ingredients in a smaller bowl, including the 1/4 cup of raisin water. Mix them together with a minimum of strokes. Pour into a greased 8x8 pan, or 12 muffin tins. Bake until a knife comes out relatively ungoopy- 18-20 minutes for muffins, 40 or so for the bread.

You could add nuts if you were a nut person, but I am not. Nuts in baked goods- Sacrilege!

What I've Been Reading

So, our whole family has been battling this stupid cold for weeks. It seems like we're just re-infecting each other, over and over again. So I've been reading a lot between the sniffles and hacking cough. (And yes, I did call my doctor today, and I'm waiting for them to call back.)

A while ago, Guy and I bought a huge pile of graphic novels from a friend who was moving. I'm not usually much of a comic book reader- you just don't get enough reading time for what you spend on them. Although I do have fond memories of reading every scrap of Elfquest available in our local library back in high school. (It's online now! You can read it for free!)

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. One of the titles our friend was selling off was Fables, and I picked up all eleven volumes that he was selling on a whim. And then they sat on a shelf for a few months. And then I ran out of books to read.

I think I read all eleven of these in less than a week.

Fables is a fractured fairy tale type of story- the characters from the old fairy tales and nursery rhymes have had to flee their homelands and have set up an enclave in New York City called Fabletown. Somehow this is pulled off without excessive silliness and the reader is drawn into the world that the authors have created.

Luckily for me, volume eleven finishes off a major story arc. So I can wait for a while before I track down the next seven volumes that have come out. But I will definitely be reading them at some point! And so should you.

Toddlers and Technology

This is what happens when you ask my son to smile for the camera.

Here you see the Little Man posing with his Christmas present from one set of grandparents. It's a Leapster GS, one of those little game systems for kiddos that are intended to be educational. He loves this toy, of course- It's just like the ones mom and dad and the big kids have, with all the right buttons and sounds. And it's a well designed device, simple enough for him to use on his own with very little help, but offering a wide variety of different activities.

Up until now, Guy and I have had a pretty straightforward view on Kai's exposure to screen time- less is better, none is best. We've limited his TV to when he's sick and lethargic; limited his iPad use to special circumstances such as long car rides and airplanes; limited computer use to Skypeing his grandparents for the most part. Of course we haven't been perfect, but those were our ideals and we've stuck to them pretty well, because we both believe that exposure to TV and such at an early age is a big contributor to AD/HD and a host of other learning difficulties.

This gift has been the perfect catalyst to re-examine our policies now that Kai is no longer a baby, but a little boy. It's pretty clear that we won't be able to keep his world screen-free- we're both too hooked to our own devices to model it well, so the screens would become the forbidden fruit that he'd overindulge in at the first chance. But we want to encourage a balance, where he spends more time in active, imaginative play and recognizes that screen time is a treat, like sweets, that we indulge in sparingly.

Luckily, Guy and I had already done a lot of talking about what we wanted to do about screen time as Kai got older, so it was pretty easy to decide on a policy to put into place. And here it is-

1. We don't mention it unless he asks for it. If he's happy playing with toys, we let that keep going.
2. If he asks to watch TV or "do game", we assign him a clean-up job to do first- something like "Pick up all of your Legos" or "Put your books in your book basket."
3. There is an absolute upper time limit per day. He can watch one episode of a show or play his game for 25 minutes (the length of an episode.)

The idea we are working with is that screen time needs to be balanced with productive work. Guy and I are also examining the example we are showing, and we've both decided that we're coming up short. So we're bringing this idea into our own routines as well- before we sit down and do something passive, we need to spend time doing something creative, productive, or active. So yesterday I sewed for a while, and Guy worked on some spaceship models. We're going to work on doing more writing and playing music as well. It seems like a good way to start off the year.

New Year, New Blog

I think I had a really fun idea for a sewing blog, but I'm just not sewing enough to post regularly. So I'm re-imagining this blog as a forum for all of my different interests- reading, writing, sewing, thoughts on parenting and education, geekery, and all kinds of other things. It will be something like a journal, I suppose. Ideally it will be funny and maybe even a little helpful to people.

The title isn't going to work, though. Sewing will still be a part of this blog, yes- but not the be all and end all. I've been thinking of Naptime Blues. See, naptime is when I can indulge in all those hobbies... but naptime is also the biggest battle of my day, at home or at work.

So there you are. Happy New Year, folks!

Here's a random picture of the Little Man for you all.

Napkins and Excuses

Gosh, it's hard to keep up with a blog. I think that's what many, many people who try to write blogs discover. And it's harder for me, because I have this disorder... Laziness Syndrome.

It is so a disorder. Look it up.

Okay, it isn't. But with moving and adjusting to full time hours, it feels like I am always tired.

But! I sewed something!

I was reading an article about parents who spend hundreds of dollars to put their children in etiquette classes, because they are not learning manners at home. And of course I thought "That's ridiculous!" But I also thought about manners in our house, and in some convoluted way came to the conclusion that we needed cloth napkins. So I busted out my stash of fat quarters and made some fun napkins for us.

This is such a simple project. I feel silly even posting instructions. Get a fat quarter. Square it off. Hem. Done. It's a great project for splashy fabrics that you can't find a use for and beginning sewists looking for an easy practical project.

Of course, if you were an organized person with a well set up sewing area, you would have ironed these, squared them off with a rotary cutter, and pinned the hems. I did none of these things and I think they turned out just fine.

In other thoughts- I am thinking of changing this into a more general blog, where I would post other things such as parenting comments, Montessori ideas, rants, stuff I'm reading, and so on. I will probably do that soonish.