Lunchbox Pizza

Reese has been coming home with a lunchbox full of her lunch for the majority of the year now.  "what do you eat?" I ask her.  Mostly she tells me she shares with friends, but since most of her lunch is still in the box, I don't know what she's sharing with them.

She's slowing stopped eating any sort of protein, too.  She liked Go-gurts, until one splattered on her when she opened it.  She doesn't like peanut butter sandwiches anymore, and won't eat plain peanut butter on a spoon, or peanuts in general.  She used to like ham and cheese roll-ups (we would roll cheddar up in lunch meat) but has changed her mind on those.  She won't eat string cheese anymore.  We put cottage cheese in her lunches and that worked for about two weeks.

So we've been having trouble packing lunches.  The other day she came home and told me that her friend let her try one of her home-lunch pizzas.  She said she put the sauce and the cheese and the pepperoni on it and it came with a piece of chocolate.  This sounds suspiciously like a Lunchable,

And I have not yet caved in to the pre-made lunches.  So far, with the occasional exception, our lunches have been entirely made from scratch- mostly to save on cost, a little because I like to know what's going into my kid's bodies.  But there is room for compromise here!

Pita bread + pepperoni + shredded mozzarella + home made marinara sauce = Reese actually eats lunch again!  Yay!

She likes it so much she asked to have it for dinner.  I was worried about her getting sick of it, but Will and I are going out tonight to eat dinner with someone I am interviewing for a school project, so she picked the right day to ask for this simple dinner.

So we'll call this a win.

Valentines n Stuff

The week before Valentines, Liam got invited to a birthday party for a friend from school.  They went to one of those bow-up toy places. He had a blast.

In the goody bag he got a small car, a stamp, and some stick-on mustaches.  He wasted no time stamping himself on the forehead, and he and Reese utilized the mustaches pretty quickly after he got home.

And then Reese found the stamp and made sure her forehead got stamped, too.

Valentines.  Valentines isn't a huge holiday at our house.  Will got me a box of my favorite candy, Zours.  That's about it.  

Reese did pass out Valentines at her school.  We had a last-minute crisis the on Valentine's eve when we realized we couldn't use any of Reese's personalized Valentine cards that I purchased in a big bunch two years ago, because they say "from Reese" on them, and in Reese's class she's not "Reese", she's "Shareese" because there's another Reese.  If she handed out those, everyone would think that it was from the other girl.  I had Will run to the dollar store and by then they were out of variety.  Reese is pretty girly, but she ended up having to hand out Phineas and Ferb Valentines.

I made up for it by helping her make a girly Valentine box.  Her favorite color is red, so we used red wrapping paper.  Then she glued hearts and decorations on it.

Liam's class didn't do boxes, but he got jealous so we put one together for him, anyway.

At school she got to wear a big conversation heart.  All the kid's hearts said "te quiero" on one side from their Spanish class. (For the record, I did make it to the school and help out with the Valentines festivities- that's the second class party I've helped with even while being in school myself.)

That night we went to visit family for the long weekend, and got taken out to Chick-fil-A by Gramma and Grampa Faber.  Yay!

A week later, Valentines is over, and Reese had her first big childhood scrape-up when she tripped and landed face-first on the driveway.  Knees, hands, face, bloody nose, the whole shebang. She got lots of band-aids.  Also, Liam's school had a theme week on the week of Valentines, and one of the dress-up days was "fake injury day" and we wrapped his head in a bandage.  Reese decided that wrapping her head in a bandage like Liam had would help her feel better.

Looks like it worked.

Will's Birthday

Will got older this year.  

Since it's his last week at Goldman, his co-workers had two reasons to take him out to lunch.  He left work early so he could get home around the same time Shareese got home from school. He opened up presents before we went out to dinner at Chick-fil-A where the kids got to play in the playplace. We brought a cake with us and sang "Happy Birthday" there. I had to go to a lab for school after we came home, but I had gotten ahead on homework so that I wouldn't have to worry about it when I got home, and Will and I could have some quality time together that evening.  He said that it was an enjoyable birthday.   

Reese and Liam really wanted to buy him new Skylanders because they love having Daddy time playing the Skylanders video game.

(The box wrapped in a blanked ended up being a lays chips assortment, for him to take to work with his lunches)

(I couldn't get them to take any serious-faced photos for a while)

"Happy Birthday Daddy"

(See! I was there that day!)

Happy birthday, Old Man!