 {I can’t actually get any wflw posts to come up, so I guess I’m flying solo!}
Inspired by Annabel Karmel’s Chicken Sausage Snails from First Meals (one of my favorite 0-5 cookbooks, and my lifesaver when I suddenly became a first time parent of an 8 month old).
Snail bodies are chicken breast, grated apple, diced onion, parsley, fresh breadcrumbs and a little bit of curry powder, pulsed until smooth-ish in a food processor,  rolled into a mixture of flour and panko and pan fried. The (completely disproportionate and oversized) shells are leftover mashed potato made into cakes. The “sun” in the bowl is leftover fruit juice and yogurt broth from the “Pink Fruit Soup” kidlet made yesterday and mandarin oranges. The salad “grass” received a ranch dressing fertilization before Kidlet would actually eat it.
Baby L loved the sausages and potato, but spit out the salad. Kidlet ate his salad, the fruit, and a few bites of everything else and said he was full. Who knows?!
I didn’t follow the recipe precisely, but the official version follows:
Chicken Sausage Snails
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375 g (12 oz) raw, skinned boneless chicken breast
1 small onion, finely chopped
1/2 T. fresh parsley, chopped
1/2 chicken stock cube, crumbled
1 small apple, peeled & grated
2 tbsp breadcrumbs
Flour for coating
Vegetable oil for frying
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500g (1 lb) potatoes, into chunks1 tbsp milk
15 g (1/2 oz) butter
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Shredded cabbage
1 carrot, into thin slices
Frozen peas
Tomato ketchup
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Put the chicken, onion, parsley, crumbled stock cube, apple and breadcrumbs into a food processor. Chop for a few seconds. Form the mixture into 4 sausages each about 12 cm (5 inches) long. Spread the flour on a plate and use to coat the sausages. Heat the oil in a frying pan, add the sausages and sauté for about 15 minutes, turning occasionally or until browned on all sides and cook through. Meanwhile, place the potatoes in the bottom of a steamer, cover with water and cook until tender. Five minutes before the potatoes are cooked put the vegetables for decorating in the top of the steamer and cook until tender. Mash the potatoes with the milk and butter. To assemble, form the potato into 4 dome shapes (maybe you could use an ice-cream scoop) or you could create a spiral (using an piping bag). Decorate to create the spiral snail shell pattern using ketchup. Put a chicken sausage underneath each dome of potato. Use the steamed carrot sticks and peas to make the snails feelers, mouth and eyes. Arrange the cabbage as grass!
I picked up a few sets of plush food sets at Ikea and have them in a basket for tot school this week, but I find there are a couple in the vegetable set that I really don’t know what they are supposed to be.
I suppose my best guess on the lower one is cucumber. { Although I don’t think the center of a cucumber looks very star like.} I am 100% at a loss on the one in the back. If it wasn’t such a pain to get pictures off my camera (I’m having to have the hubby put them onto his machine, upload them to the internet, and then I can download them to my machine) I would get a better picture of that one in the back. It’s got a bulbous bottom with garlic like stringy bits, a couple straight leek-like leaves, but only part way up, and the center is a cylindrical light green thing with a swirl on top.
Maybe they are some kind of foreign local Swedish vegetables. 😉
Edit:
OK, here it is. What is it?!
Menu plan Monday! Long time no see!Â
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Monday: Salmon Cakes and Lemon-Garlic Aioli, Lentil salad with Watercress, Broccoli, Cauliflower and Carrots
Tuesday:Â Â Curried Coconut Chicken, Noodles, Green Beans, Pink Fruit Soup
Wednesday: Ravioli with Sausage Sauce, Garlic Toast, Asparagus
Thursday: Garden Vegetable Soup (from the book Growing Vegetable Soup), Grilled Cheese & Tomato Sandwiches, Pineapple Spears
Friday: Easy Skillet Tacos, Mexican Corn, Corn Chips and Salsa, Cucumber Salad
Saturday: Pesto Chicken Breasts with Summer Squash, Polenta
Sunday: Grilled Turkey Tenderloin, Black Bean and Corn Salad,
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Even when not listed, I generally serve green salad and some kind of fruit at dinner each night. Next week the kids are both in mild learning mode with a food theme. The soups on tuesday and thursday are recipes that kidlet will be making.
This post is linked to Menu Plan Monday at Organizing Junkie.  Check out the hundreds of other menus posted.
 This week I am focusing on the “buh” sound (which is one of the first 6 sounds that children usually vocalize) with Baby L, so I’ve picked activities that will afford me lots of opportunities to use B words.
Baby L is 14.5 months
Contact Paper Collage. The first one we tried a couple weeks ago was such a success that I decided to do another one with her. Like last time, I created a cardstock paper frame for the contact paper to keep it from curling and to make it easier to move around.
I gathered a bunch of blue papers, pictures and objects. To make a more interesting tactile experience, I included things other than paper this time, like feathers, rhinestones, etc. The baby was pushing buttons on my camera to entertain herself yesterday and apparently changed the picture quality, which I didn’t notice, so these photos are all pretty small.
She discovered pretty quickly that (unlike the last one, which was mostly tissue paper and was stuck for good once she put it down) she could re-position objects. I just let her choose what she wanted from the pile, and place it wherever she wanted and move it at will, and just narrated what ever she was doing.
When she lost interest and it was looking pretty full, I covered it with a second piece of clear contact paper to seal it. I hung her art at toddler eye level on the glass door in the family room. Her finished work remained on display on the door for about 20 seconds before she pulled it down. 😉
Vocabulary: Picture, Sticky, Blue, B, names of the pictured items
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Basket of shaker bottles. I filled recycled plastic water bottles with a variety of dry materials. Baby L helped with the rice, using a funnel.Â
We ended up with bottles filled with marbles, rice, metal bits, pom poms, glass gem vase filler things, and left one empty for comparison. I sealed (lets’s hope!) the lids with glue before we played with them.
Baby L enjoyed shaking the bottles to hear the different sounds. The more full ones took more effort to get noise out of them (had to turn them further) and she got so proud when she managed to make the bottles dance and sing.
Her favorite way was by “drinking” from the bottles and getting the filler to rush down at her face. LOL
Vocabulary: Bottle, shake, music, loud, soft, noisy, quiet, empty
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I had meant to do a sensory box with dried beans and some “Three Bear Family Counters” (I bought them at a local Learning Palace, and paid about half what they are on Amazon though) along with our measuring cup scoops. I think the counters will be great in the future for comparing sizes and making patterns. Anyway, I discovered that I only had one little tiny bag of dried beans, so instead I used some bear shaped pasta that I had picked up for bento.Â
I gave her two plastic containers and a scoop on a sheet pan and showed her how to scoop and transfer from one bowl to the other.
This is by far my favorite picture of the week =)
Vocabulary: Bear, Bowl, Dig, Pour, Scoop
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Alphabet Letters. I picked up a tub of large magnetic letters at Learning Palace and set them up in a basket along with a small magnetic wipe board.
We started with just the two B’s, but she wanted to dig into the bucket. I just let her stick them on and pull them off, making the letter sound for each one that she picked up.
I spelled out her name for her and gave her the final “L” to put in a row, but as you can see she didn’t get the lining up of the letters and just put it where she liked it instead 😉
Vocabulary: letters, alphabet, letter names & sounds, stick, lift
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We also spent some extra times playing will balls. She likes the o-balls as well as the holey wiffle ball style colorful balls I picked up from Gymboree a few years back. A lot easier for her to grip and manipulate, I guess. I hung some of them on a piece of yarn and strung them between 2 offset door handles and showed her how to move them to the high side and let them slide down.Â
She moved them back and forth for a while, and then started to get frustrated that she couldn’t get them off. I had to go track down a couple more balls to give to her to play with on the floor. 😉
As normal for the summer, we spend some time outside every day. In keeping with reinforcing the “buh” sound, we blew bubbles and played with buckets and boats at the water table.
New sign: Bear – Cross your arms and claw your chest a couple times.
Books we read this week (in addition to lots of other reading we do daily): Going on a Bear Hunt, More Bugs in Boxes, Boats, Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See, Belly Button Book
Find more terrific tot school posts over at 1+ 1 + 1Â = 1
As I’ve mentioned before, I am not putting a lot of emphasis on learning over the summer for kidlet, but I have been fitting in things like writing practice and doing a lot of introductory chatting about food groups, mainly in “sneaky” ways. As we come to the last few weeks before school begins, I’m planning on including more “formal” learning time, a little bit more each week, to get him back into the habit.
I have some serious concerns about kidlet’s weight, so I’m preparing to move beyond just learning the food groups into the food pyramid, servings and sizes, and focus more on why some things are more healthful choices than others. I will not talk about weight or do anything that will imply different body shapes are “bad”.Â
Anyway, as I was creating a rough outline for a lesson plan for next week, I realized that a lot of the materials could be used in simpler activities for tot school, and decided to use food as a focus for tot school as well.
To supplement the things that I do have that will work for baby L, I made these fruit and vegetable stick puppets for us to play with. I thought they came out very cute!
Kidlet and I had painted about 50 sheets of white cardstock in various shades (practicing color mixing and to have painted papers that would lend themselves to creating the collage-y look of Eric Carle or Lois Ehlert) and I used that cardstock, which is what gives the pieces that paint-brushy texture that you can see in some of the colors especially well. I cut out the produce shapes, added the faces and a few little lines and such for accents and then glued them to popsicle sticks.
Busy, busy week so far. Feels like I am constantly rushing from one thing to another. I guess I feel it more too because DH isn’t really here to help at all this week. His boss is visiting from Chicago and its been at least 3 years since they were able to get together face to face. Where he ordinarily works from home a fair amount of time, and is done for the day by 4 and can help out with Baby L so I can clean a little and make dinner, and normally does kidlets night time routine, he is staying late, going to dinner with the boss, etc, so I am on my own for all the kids waking hours.
Kidlet has swim class every morning for the next two weeks. Immediately afterwards yesterday I had to head to a meeting with the former volunteer coordinator for our PTA (I don’t remember if I posted that I was roped into elected to that position which apparently is a two year term I just discovered at a PTA board training last Saturday). I figured it would take 30 minutes, maybe an hour tops, but I ended up being there over 2 hours, and if I hadn’t pushed to get out of there to get baby L home for a nap, I think it could have gone on much longer =0
Today after swimming we headed out to a park for one of the planned “incoming first graders park meets” from kidlets school. We’ve been to 4 or 5 of them and they haven’t been well attended, but there were actually other families there this time. I took some terribly cute picture of the kids, but for some reason my camera isn’t communicating with my computer — I suspect there is something going on with my USB stuff, because my iphone stopped connecting with the computer a few weeks back. Sigh.
Tomorrow after class we are headed out to Ikea. I had wanted to go on Sunday, but it just didn’t work out, and kidlet was disappointed because he loves thier play area, so I told him we could go a different day. That’s a good 30-45 minute drive one way. Whee. In the afternoon, kidlet has an appointment with his counsellor and although its a tremendous pain to deal with baby L and her rampant running around while trying to work with kidlet and his doctor, I don’t seem to have a lot of options since DH won’t be able to make it home to take care of the baby.
Thursday we have another park play date in the afternoon, and then I have my first official PTA officer board meeting. Thankfully my SiL is able to come over and sit with the kids that evening, since I have no clue when DH will make it home.
Friday might actually be open. knock wood.
It can be overwhelming to parent at times. I want to be a great mom and give my kids as much as I can. I buy so many books, research so much on the internet, collect ideas. Sometimes it seems that I can’t even work my way through everything before my kiddo is out of the stage I’ve been studying! I know I barely scratched the surface of my infant books and here Baby L is already a toddler!Â
I’m going to try and particpate in Tot School. I spend so much time collecting and implementing the ideas and far less time on documentation, but at the end of the day I’m never confident that I’ve done everything I could and should have done, so I thought I’d try keeping track for a while to (hopefully) show myself that I am not slacking off on the parenting =)
Baby L is 14 months
Baby L still isn’t doing much talking at 14+ months, so I continue to try and talk to her as much as possible, narrating if nothing else. Truthfully, it gets tiresome, and sometimes I feel a little silly, but she needs to hear it!
Putting stuff into other stuff. Wooden puzzles with handles. Blocksters. Buttons into recycled can.
The blocksters are a pretty good toy. The blocks are brightly colored with various animals printed on them. A number of them “do” things (rattle, mirrors, roller, etc).  They are easy to grip and baby L likes to stack them (3 high is about as far as she can manage so far). The carrying box acts as a simple shape sorter, which is what she has been enjoying doing lately. She just beams with pride when she gets one into a hole where it fits!
In addition to the shape puzzle, we have the crab/turtle/fish puzzle also with big grip handles by Melissa and Doug as well. She still struggles getting those into place.Â
Vocabulary: in, out, circle, square, triangle, turtle, crab, fish, button, red, green, blue
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Tissue Box. Every time we change her diaper, baby L wants to pull out all the wipes, so this week I picked up a few tissue boxes just for her and tot school time.
When she emptied one box, we gathered up the sheets and shoved them back in for her to pull out again, but she didn’t enjoy pulling them the second time nearly as well since a new tissue didn’t pop out conveniently as they do on a fresh box.
Vocabulary:Â Pull, push, in, out
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On Thursday during scheduled Tot School time, she didn’t want to focus on our planned activity, and ended up bringing me one of her brothers DVDs (Fantastic Field Trip to the Planets, which is old and still gives Pluto planet cred ;)Â I think they have released an updated version; I may have to pick it up because both kids really like the video (even though its pretty cheesy and you just KNOW the child actor that plays the lead is totally embarassed for anyone he knows now to know he made the video! lol), and its actually got a nasty crack in the inner hole and it flakes a little more every time we play it, and I suspect it’s life span to be short), which I think she likes because the planets have human faces transparently super imposed on them and they all sing catchy songs.Â
So I just went with it. I hardly expect my 14 month old to learn the planets, but after all, tot school is really just about exposure, and if I’m sitting there with her and we are singing along and talking about celestial objects, how can that be a bad thing, when its what she wanted to do?!
Vocabulary: planet names, Sun, Space, Sing
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Rice Box. We don’t have a sand box, and I haven’t been able to convince my (relatively) unhandy husband that he could easily build one with plans off the internet, so this box filled with 40 pounds of rice is our sustitute. This is the first time Baby L had seen it, and although we started out inside on a rug that I could pick up and shake out, she was tossing rice way out beyond the rug borders, so I moved us outside.
You can see that she climbed right in. When she tried to get out, her wiggling would just move the rice out from under her so she sank down further. Finally she just sat down all the way and played in the box for a while =)
We used measuring cups and glass stone gem things (vase filler) for scooping, digging, pouring and burying.
Vocabulary:Â Rice, Dig, Pour, Scoop, Bury, Find
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New sign: Cheese ( I probably have an ASL vocabulary of about 50-60 words, and I use them throughout the day, but I’ve been choosing one a week to really focus on and she if she will pick it up. So far she has “more” (but she does it with open palms instead of pressing the fingers and thumbs together), “all done” and “milk”.)
Find more terrific tot school posts over at 1+ 1 + 1Â = 1
Daily: Read, Walk, Outside/Water Table, Dance (she really likes the “hold still — wiggle, wiggle, wiggle” song from Yo Gabba Gabba),
Summer is 2/3 gone already, its hard to belive. Another month and it’s back to the grindstone for the kidlet. In the meantime, camp invention is winding down. Here is todays packed lunch.
Egg salad sammies with cheese duck toppers. Wavy sliced apple flowers, strawberries and (currently frozen) blueberries, peas and a slice of strawberry and cream jellyroll.
Kidlet has his final week long day camp this week. He is doing Camp Invention being held at his elementary school, which this year is thier “Innovate” program . It has a number of modules, but his favorite yesterday was disassembling a “take apart item”, which we sent with him (He took an old mini boombox and a broken Brainy Brainy toy) and they are using along with a bunch of different recycled items (some brought in by each of the participating kids) to create some crazy invention. He wouldn’t tell me what he is planning on making. I get to be suprised at the end of the week.
Egg salad pocket sandwich, which I had to cut in half to fit. Watermelon hearts and blueberries. Carrot hearts and yellow cauliflower. 2 lil’ smokies.
I am going to have to find one of those little tiny pocket sandwich makers that creates multiple sandwiches from one large one. I know I’ve seen them somewhere online. I just have to figure out where.
Yesterday Baby L did her first real art project. I took clear contact paper in a cardstock frame (I had leftovers from the Frank Lloyd Wright presentation I did for art lit) and a box of styrofoam, textured paper, and tissue paper hearts and strips (leftover from the collage card project I did with Kidlet’s class for their friendship party) and set her up in her high chair.
I let her pick a few things at a time from the box and showed her how to stick it to the contact paper and press it down. I just let her go until she got bored with it.Â
The finished project.
I did occasionally rotate the paper to put a more unfinished area closer to her. Suprisingly, I didn’t really have to trim anything from around the edges. She placed a few items so that they hung over a little bit, but mostly kept to the sticky bits.