Moving On

My dad turned 54 last Friday, so Mom had a little birthday party for him and invited all the usual suspects. We did some throw-back-to-childhood games and one of them was a take on Pin the Tail on the Donkey. This game was called Plant the Kiss on Micah. Each of the girls put on some lipstick and kissed two sticky notes, one for themselves and one for their spouse. Then Mom blindfolded each of us in turn, spun us around, and off we went to try to get our "lips" as close to Micah's as possible. (A little aside: Dad did a photo shoot with Micah when he was about three months old. He then took one of the pictures from the shoot and had it blown up to about 3' by 2'. Huge, I know. This is what we were using to plant our "kisses" on, not the real-life Micah.).


It was a really fun game, obvious by all the screeching and laughter, but guess who won? Me! I stuck my "lips" squarely on his. Nope, I didn't cheat, either. Here, I'll show you:


Don't know if you can see it really well, but the sticky note covering his lips says, "Jess." The lips directly above are his Auntie Kristina's. Dad and Yana get the prize for last place, their lips were planted on a doorway and a lamp!

And I thought I'd throw in a little baby food making update. He's been eating the pears I made and is still alive and well, so that's good. I cut up some bananas and froze them yesterday and pulled out a chuck (along with two pear cubes) this morning for his lunch. It's so incredibly easy, I'm loving it! I took the (very) easy way out with apples (his new food of the week). I stopped at Trader Joe's and bought three jars of organic applesauce. Each jar costs $2.29 and contains 24 ounces of applesauce, so that comes about to be about $0.10 an ounce. And it couldn't be any easier to freeze, I just spooned the applesauce into an ice cube tray and let it freeze overnight before transferring them to a bag! The other food I made was butternut squash. Remember how I said I'd just be buying them because they looked too hard to make? Boy was I wrong! D and I were shopping on Saturday and came across a butternut squash. He asked if I would be willing to make it, so I said I'd give it a try. I "made" it last night by simply cutting it in half, putting each half face down in an inch of water and baking it for half an hour. The skin puckers and peels right off, leaving the inside meat ready to mash/puree/whatever. Since I had to feed Micah, D ended up pureeing Micah's half of the squash and did an excellent job getting the perfect consistency (we'll be eating our half of the squash tonight). I was able to make 12 ounces for $0.60. Needless to say, I will not be buying jarred butternut squash anymore! And, finally, I saw lots of nicely (nicely=already cut up/easy prepared/pureed) frozen fruits and veggies at Trader Joe's yesterday for very reasonable prices. This means I get to cut out some prep time since they're already peeled and cut. They say frozen foods are fresher than fresh since they are flash frozen at their freshest. Make sense? Anyway, I'm totally enjoying this baby food making thing!