the twinkle in my eye

wow – thank you for making me feel normal about the twinkle’s eating habits! jen’s mum’s advice (isn’t she a MCH nurse?) is spot-on in line with what our book says and i have found it surprisingly comforting and even affirming. so we will continue to do our job of serving up the healthy food, and we’ll leave it up to the twinkle to do her job of eating it.  i do have a slight nagging voice in my head that says “what if she never learns her job and never eats a vegetable?” but maybe i should give her more credit.

in an effort to serve up vegies in an appealing format i made some babaganoush (or, bubba-ganoush, as i like to call it when i serve it to my bub. lazyboo should feel free to just call it baba-ganoush). it was fun and easy to make, even though i got my advice from stephanie (who special k finds very difficult to follow). i just stuck an eggplant into the naked flame on our gas stove, holding it with tongs and moved it around from time to time until all of the skin was completely black and burnt and blistering. this made our kitchen smell like dope and had me immediately transported to this time in a caravan park in brisbane when i was 19. but i digress. then i let the eggplant cool down a bit and peeled all the black skin off it and quickly rinsed off the little bits that were still sticking, and chopped off the stalk which i probably should have done at the start. then i squished the whole thing flat with my (clean, i assure you) hand and poured off some of the eggplant juice. then i just stuck the whole thing in the food processor. i spooned in some tahini that was hanging around in the fridge after some recent-ish home made hommus, plus poured in some olive oil (i was generous because the twinkle is a skinny mini), a little bit of salt and even less pepper and some crushed garlic. at this point i would have also added some lemon juice but i couldn’t find any lemons so i put in some lime juice from one of those squeezy bottles (i always keep a bottle handy – how exotic) and i blitzed it in the food processor until it resembled babaganoush. and every night since i’ve put a bit on her dinner plate with wholegrain biscuits and carrot and cucumber sticks and she has eaten some each night (although she hasn’t eaten the carrot or the cucumber).

this photo shows tonight’s dinner – after she’d finished with it. the only difference from before dinner is: a couple of shavings of parmesan are gone from on top of the meat, a mouthful of bubba-ganoush is gone, all the wholegrain bikkies are gone, and there is a whole lot of corn kernels on the ground under the high chair.

that’s all on food for now. but let me share one more cute moment from the holiday that i left out of the countdown/meltdown:

11. the twinkle getting cousin a’s childhood dolly and using the doll’s little hand to press the button on the ride-on fire truck to make it sing.

i was thinking about this tonight while the twinkle was in the bath and i absent-mindedly started singing:

i see a fire truck, a big red shiny fire truck. i see a fire truck coming down the street. and there’s a noisy siren wailing on that bus.

and this made the twinkle so excited that she did a crazy ethnic tribal dance in the bath and yelled for “bore! bore!” and i had to sing it all the way from bath time, through bottle time and book time to bed time. and she did the crazy dance in her cot when she was supposed to be calming down and falling asleep.