I Have Two Little Hands

My little boy is my friend. This I have to remind myself a lot this past little while as he has been a little challenging. Maybe he is hitting the "terrible twos", I don't know, but it has been "fun" trying to keep him from getting into trouble. When he gets cranky, he can be pretty destructive with his little hands. So today, we tried to do a variety of things to keep his hands (and mind) occupied with more constructive activities. I haven't done a whole lot of reading into parenting books (stating the obvious) so just keep this in mind...

Last month we started an Aedan Craft project dealing with the letters of the alphabet. We are all the way to the letter H. So we decided to do some Hand prints. It was quite messy but as you can see he enjoyed it.

The final product, if you can tell there are hand prints there. The one on the right was kind of cute. I call it, O Tannenbaum Abstractica...

There are several things that Aedan tries to get involved in and if I don't allow him to help, the task ends up taking much longer to complete because I have to not only do the task at hand but I have to take care of an upset kid. He loves to help with the laundry, the dusting, and the cooking to name a few, and so naturally, I've wanted to encourage that while maintaining what sanity I have left after he "helps" me. I've also tried making food time a fun time for him by introducing as much variety as he can handle. This has proved to be good and bad - good because he enjoys out of the ordinary foods and bad because it has made him not enjoy some of the ordinary. Like sandwiches for example, the kid wont readily eat a PB&J sandwich. He doesn't go for a lot of convenient foods (again, pros and cons). He goes for the expensive cuts of meat and the kinds of vegetables most kids don't. Are they supposed to have such refined tastes at such a young age? So I kind of give and take a little in our mealtimes and I probably have just as many successes as failures with his eating.

Today for lunch the little chef and I made pizza bagels. I think he eats more just making it then he eats after it is cooked. We get those small wheat bagels and cut them in half and toast them in the toaster. We set the toasted bagel slices on a cookie sheet lined with foil. We then spread on some sauce, in this case, some leftover spaghetti sauce with cooked wheat berries in to sneak in some extra nutrition (I will hopefully do a wheat post soon). We top it with leftover fresh pineapple cut up into bits, with some ham or today was turkey deli meat, and some olives. Extra olives. He loves his "olips" and he eats more than he puts on the bagels.

We then scooch the bagels real close and spread mozzarella cheese haphazardly across the tops, bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes, or until melted, and then broil for 2 more minutes for a nice toasted top. These freeze really well after they are cooked and cooled.

Well it is something to help meal times be more interactive right? So I've heard if you let the child help with the meal prep - even going as far as letting them help in the garden, picking the fruit, etc. - they tend to be better eaters. In some ways I can see that is the case with Aedan but if anything it has helped him become a better snacker.