nice rack!

jordan has become quite the chef. he's taken a few knife skills classes lately, one of which included crowning a rack of lamb.

cut to the boys. they are virtually vegetarians. save for chicken nuggets (abel), and the whimsy of eating bbq or grilled fish or chicken (oz), they are adamantly anti-meat. add to that our recent reading of eating animals by jonathan safran foer and watching food inc., we're on the cusp of veggie central around here. and that's in part why tonight was so darn amusing.

the other part is the boys picky eating. i feel like if they could eat fruit, mac and cheese and nut butter sandwiches and yogurt for every meal, they'd be perfectly content. they do surprise us on occasion and devour deep dish spinach pizza from lou malnatis (thanks again mom!), or grilled salmon in a soy ginger glaze, or nibble straight up lettuce. but for the most part, i feel like we struggle to figure out something that we all want to eat.

i thought tonight's meal would be a defacto "i not LIKE it!" (whine emphasis). i even prepared myself for complete meal rejection when jordan announced his plan to make that beautiful lamb, fully defrosted in the fridge. it would, without a doubt, be a dinner of sliced apples for the boys. fine.

dinner was served. a gorgeous rack encrusted in panko, garlic, rosemary and dijon. the smell alone was intoxicating. "what's that, mommy?!" stroke of brilliance comes out of my mouth..."meat lollipops! want one?"

yeah! sure! yummy! meat lollipops!

devoured. every bit of meat cleaned from the bone. no hesitation. it was a wild success. our kids love rack of lamb, eh em, i mean meat lollipops. success via linguistics twist? who knows and i don't care. all i know is i will gladly be a vegetarian six days out of the week so i can eat that rack of lamb on the seventh. it was that good.


our little abel-tarian devours his meat lollipop


oz demonstrates what "clean to the bone" looks like

i need a remedy

we started 2010 knocking on wood. every time i talked to friends and they brought up their kids' coughs, colds, flu, and everything that was going around, i quietly bit my lip, said a prayer, and hoped that the mere realization that the boys had been illness-free for a while didn't totally jinx us.

i should have known better.

we've been in this new decade for a mere two months and both boys have already rebounded from strep - twice - not to mention an ear infection in abel, some weird skin allergy on abel's penis (i know, TMI, but some lamisil and triple paste took care of it after a $500 dollar visit to a urologist - nice!), and now a round of colds with a nasty cough. and we all know what antibiotics can do to a toddler's stomach. let's just say we all got more than we bargained for last week when abel gleefully ran naked into the room, squatted and yelled, "mommy, watch me!" and farted way too loud. it's been a lovely start to the year!

i've never been one to take medicine and i absolutely HATE giving it to my kids, so i've started to do my homework on homeopathic and alternative remedies. obviously we needed to give our kids antibiotics for strep, but after our toddler prank gone awry, i decided the yogurt just wasn't cutting it. i found this awesome product that i think is fantastic: "yum-yum dophilus" by jarrow formulas. it's true to it's name - yummy. the boys think it's candy, but it's all natural strains of probiotics. within a day, we were regular again - yahoo! we've done probiotics before, but they were always a powder i mixed in to their juice and sometimes they drank it and sometimes they didn't. this stuff is so good, we're going to stay on it for preventative measures.

next up, the nasty cough oskar got this weekend. he was up all night on saturday and so were we. he honestly coughed every 10 seconds. poor boy. i was on a quest sunday to find a homeopathic remedy for cough and found this miracle: children's "chestal" by boiron. it tastes like honey, they get a tsp every two hours, and it honestly quelled his cough immediately. i was flabbergasted!

we were blessed with an awesome book at one of our showers called, "smart medicine for a healthier child" by zand, roundtree and walton. this book not only covers typical prescription and OTC medicine, their benefits/negatives/side effects, but more importantly alternative, homeopathic and home remedies for every ailment and illness you can think of. I LOVE THIS BOOK! i've been obsessed with it as of late and it hasn't guided me wrong yet. if you are into alternative treatments and remedies, please pick up a copy.

knock on wood if you all have been doing better than us. or better yet, the thought didn't even cross your mind.