To Eat or Not to Eat

Supper is over at our house tonight, and our collective tummies are filled with "comfort" food. Now I know that term has a good and bad connotation, because "comfort" food necessarily contains excessive amounts of cheese and butter, but of course that's what makes it so good! Tonight I made a family favorite from my growing up years--Chicken Broccoli Hotdish. It's a delectable combination of broccoli and chicken smothered with a rich sauce made from cream of mushroom soup, shredded cheese, mayonnaise and sour cream, with curry powder and lemon juice for flavor, topped with crushed Ritz crackers and drizzled with melted butter. YUM! On Friday nights our asianese friend Robert comes for supper and then stays overnight; this is his favorite way to eat broccoli, if you can believe it. So we enjoyed the Hotdish along with some homemade bread (ok, I confess I used my breadmaker) and homemade applesauce (ok, I confess I used my crock-pot) for dessert.

Clara Anne thought the hotdish was a great improvement over some other things she had eaten today. Lunch for her was some broccoli with rice (with a little ketchup added to help the broccoli go down!) and breakfast was her usual yogurt with oatmeal and raisins. That doesn't sound so bad, you say. Well, it was what she was eating between meals that was the problem. This morning I was working on a project at our kitchen table so I suggested that Clara Anne join me in her high chair and do some coloring. I'll let you watch what happened next:

Hey, Mom, this is fun! I like coloring! (Actually what she most likes is taking the crayons out of the box, and putting the crayons back in the box. Over...and over...)









No, no, Clara Anne, no crayons in your mouth!













Oh, dear, Clara Anne! What is that blue stuff on your tongue and stuck in your teeth? No eating crayons! [End of coloring session]













Then, just before supper while my hotdish was baking, I was doing a few dishes while John and Robert talked in the living room. Clara Anne was playing near them and suddenly came up to John, complaining about something and then opened her mouth and showed him a mouthful of . . . dirt. Oh yes, our darling daughter decided to try out the dirt in my large philodendron plant in a corner of our living room. Thankfully she did not eat any bits of leaves, since I have heard that they are poisonous (yikes!), but then when I tried to have her "rinse and spit" she just swallowed it! So, on to plan B, brushing her teeth, where a thorough scrubbing yielded a brown toothbrush. Ugh! Hopefully she learned her lesson. Now if some manufacturer would just make crayons that taste like dirt, we'd be all set. :)

Finally, (this has nothing to do with eating) I just have to share this picture of Chloe with her friend Samantha. Samantha is nine days older than Chloe, and since their sisters Clara Anne and Emma are already best friends, Chloe and Samantha are discovering that they have a true heart connection as well. Just look at them holding hands in this picture:
















If that doesn't warm your heart, you need to go eat some comfort food!