growing babies

ELP learned to crawl this week! Still no teeth, though. She can crawl to toys across the room, and two days ago found a guitar of LP's. It is shiny and red with multiple types of buttons to make noise or play songs--very much the catch for a baby. She started pressing buttons and bopping her head to the music. Little did she know that this noise was destined to attract LP, who suddenly realized he needed to play with the guitar. He started to take it, saying 'can I have that please' but not waiting for any sort of response, and I let him since it is his toy, but I reminded him of the rule: if you take something from ELP, you have to give her something else to play with. So he takes one of the most attractive toys in the house, with music and multiple things to poke at, and gives her a stick from a tinker toy set. Not even multiple connected pieces, just one of the sticks. She just looked at it--I think she knew it was a raw deal.

LP is also moving along--he is trying to learn to use the potty. The last couple of weeks, when I picked him up at daycare most days he told me that he used the potty twice, then the teacher would tell me he actually didn't use the potty. I finally realized, he's not lying to say he's used the potty _today_, but keeping a running lifetime total of how many times he's used the potty, and he just wants to keep reminding me of it! On Wednesday he developed a new potty strategy. Apparently his thinking went like this: people keep telling me not to pee in my diaper, but I don't want/know how to pee in the potty, and besides it interrupts my playtime . . . so I'll not pee at all!! He was very successful with this strategy during the day, but as those of you who are potty trained already know, it was doomed to failure. When he fell asleep he forgot about his plan, and I had to change his diaper 3 times during the night (they don't just hold an infinite amount of liquid!)

Here's a quick grouping of things to put together for dinner, though I don't think of it as a recipe as it involves already prepared things. One of my favorite mostly prepared things to buy at the store is spaghetti sauce. I think they do a good job with jarred spaghetti sauce, and I use it as-is on spaghetti sometimes. Anyway, this is a bit like a poor man's ravioli: Make some (half a box for 2 adults is how we measure here) medium size pasta such as shells or rotini, drain, and mix it with a container (the smaller container, 1 cup I think) of ricotta. Put spaghetti sauce on top. It's good!