I have baked cookies, cinnamon rolls, and a casserole. I have cooked frittatas, bacon and eggs, pork loin, chicken, salmon, bok choy… Breaking this room in has been therapeutic.

I have decided that a proper kitchen should be cleaned frequently out of necessity. Never should there be layers of dust from disuse.

A proper kitchen should be warm. Not from the thermostat setting, but from the hustle and bustle of keeping a household nourished, from water being boiled for pasta, the oven reheating bread for soup, the cast iron skillet radiating heat after frying a batch of fritters.

A proper kitchen should have a proper set of knives. Knives should be sharpenable with continuous handles so the handles don’t bend or break off while carving or chopping.

A proper kitchen should have plenty of ventilation for when things burn. Things will burn sometimes.

A proper kitchen is one in which every morsel is used. Leftover roast beef turns into shepherd’s pie. Chicken bones turn into broth. Stale bread turns into croutons for salad or crumbs for meatloaf.

On the other hand, a proper kitchen is one in which God exists as the Provider. If batter gets ruined with too much salt or an extra cup of sugar, and it needs to be thrown away, the cook should not fret because His resources are endless. I have trouble with this one sometimes.

I love that my job is my household, that I am responsible for setting the stage for rest, for nourishment, for rejuvenation. Often, my efforts at setting this stage radiate from the kitchen. While mine may not be a glorified position in this day in age, I consider it an honor. Peace, moments for quiet reflection and creativity are not afforded patience in our culture. No patience for them, but how rare and therefore how valuable and how craved, I find. The past few years have not left me much energy for hospitality. We have hunkered down in the storm. But when my home was open before, it was the place where insomniacs slept deeply, though their bed was a humble but warm spot on the couch. Walking through the door was a sigh of relief. Bellies were filled, and so were hearts.

I look forward to hospitality again.

For now, we hibernate in our new haven, staying warm and rebuilding reserves lost in the storm, getting the insides of the home in order, making plans for window boxes and gardens in the spring. Everything in its proper time.

“Steven. Do you know how much MSG is in that stuff?”

“Mmmph,” he says (his mouth is full of MSG casserole), “this tastes damn good.”

He’s right. It really does. And I have a weakness for Doritos, so I can’t really talk like I’m all organic and junk even if I do try to cook healthy most of the time.

The guy ranted and raved over the lentil fritters with cabbage slaw and Greek yogurt I made a couple of weeks ago. He eats homemade veggie burgers and chipotle mayo with a smile. He is looking forward to the fruit-stuffed pork loin I’m making on Christmas day. He will try anything once. He is an experimental cook’s dream. It’s Christmas. Here, babe, have some MSG. Enjoy.

And I guess there was something inspiring about the whole thing because, as I write, Steven is helping our baby eat a candy cane.

I need to write this down, so I’ll know how to make Steven’s casserole next time. It’s not anything special. Just a classic American casserole.

Moore American Casserole, Please!

serves: 4

8 oz. rotini, cooked til al dente
1-2 chicken breasts, cooked and cut into bite-size pieces
1 can cream of mushroom
1 can cream of chicken
5 green onions, chopped
1/2 c cheddar cheese, shredded
1/2 c chicken broth
1/2 c buttermilk
1 tsp parsley
salt and pepper to taste

Mix ingredients and pour into an 8×8. Over the top, sprinkle another 1/2 cup of cheddar cheese, 1 cup bread crumbs, and dot with 2 T of butter. Bake at 375 for 30 minutes uncovered, till bubbly. Serve with a green salad. Take the candy cane away from the baby and give him a banana instead. Give him back the candy cane because that pout is pathetic.

I think for our next MSG dinner, I’m going to try Nacho Cheese Dorito casserole. Rules are made for breakin’ and life is terminal, eh?

Our new house is an adorable old house. It is one of several houses that belong to a family who refuse to let the city tear down their childhood homes to make way for the light rail. We live in the aunt’s house, which is next door to our landlord’s childhood home. It makes me feel like I’m part of taking a stand for history. Or something. Since they refused to back down, the city altered the street instead, and built the light rail. We can walk out our front door, across the yard, across the street, to the light rail station.

When we first considered the house, I could not decide if I liked the idea of living so close to the rail station. On one hand, for a one car family, being so close to safe and comfortable public transportation could make for lots of fun day trips. On the other hand… well, at this point, the other hand can be in charge of holding my rail pass because I’m sold. And how memorable for Ezra to be able to look out the window and watch the train come and go, watch the funny people get on and off, and pack up his little backpack to spend the morning downtown with mommy or go to a baseball game with Daddy.

So we’re here.

I am not one of those people who is organized about moving. In fact, the morning of the move, I actually resorted to running my arm along various surfaces with a box to catch everything that was left to pack. Our friends showed up to help at 8, and we were loaded up by 1o. We might be disorganized, but we’re lightning fast.

Now we’re on the end of things where I pay for my disorganized method. So far, I have generated three donation boxes (large ones), and one box for consignment. We have a breakfast nook and a dining room, and neither one is arranged properly yet. So Steven and I had our pasta and wine in the living room tonight.

Gah I’m disorganized.

Sometimes I wish I was one of those bloggers who can list “Ten Ways to Conduct an Organized Move.” Not me. My boxes are mislabeled. I started throwing tissue paper everywhere thinking I’d found my mixer. Gingerbread men are in desperate need of baking. But no. The box marked “Mixer” was actually full of a bunch of glass and tchotchkes. My stuff is crazy. I am crazy. My baby is crazy–Bubba stopped sleeping through the night and now prefers to spend the early morning in our bed. Woe is me.

I actually threw a crying fit after Steven got home from work today, and I wish I could blame it on sleep deprivation, but mostly it happened because I do not handle change well. Our house is never going to be in order again. Ezra is a lunatic (yes, a lunatic). I hate the closest grocery store. Their produce is a joke. I miss my mommy friends. I still don’t have a &^%$ washer and dryer, so I resorted to handwashing diapers today since we’ve run out of disposables, and I thought I’d be brave. The hookups downstairs are mocking me. I know I joked about slapping diapers against rocks in the creek out back in a previous blog entry, but now the joke’s on me because I am just about there. When I finally do get my washer, no one on earth is going to be more grateful. Handwashing poopy diapers with a friggin bucket and plunger SUCKS. I know women in third world countries do laundry in the creek, but I am such an American.

Today was not a good day for me.

Grace is new every morning. But lucky for me, grace came a little early for me in the form of bedtime for the lunatic, a beautiful glass of red, and a husband who happily agreed to wash the dishes. I think he was looking for an excuse to escape for a moment… but, hey, the dishes got washed.

As dramatic as my breakdown was this afternoon, Ezra isn’t actually a lunatic. He’s really handling this whole thing pretty well, though I do wish he would sleep through the friggin night again. Grandma sent some fun new toys, a Little People Nativity. We spent the morning sorting through that. He is hilarious and adorable and thinks everything goes in his mouth (and please ignore my singing voice–singing the Itsy Bitsy Spider is the one surefire way of eliciting a smile my little monster).

After Steven finished washing the dishes, he sat down with me. I confessed to him my dreams for our home, and how disappointed I was about how Ezra’s first Christmas was shaping up, or deflating before my very eyes, as it were. We agreed to buy a Christmas tree and decorate it on Christmas Eve, and we might have Ezra unwrap his presents on New Year’s Eve. It doesn’t really matter because all he’s going to want to do is eat the wrapping paper. He’s six months old. He doesn’t know the difference, and he doesn’t care.

So here we are. This move has been incredibly stressful. My good friend prayed for us and described it as “tentacles” reaching out to hinder our movement. But I am glad we are here, and this house is so lovely and perfect for us, and Steven’s job is wonderful. I keep thinking of the Israelites, and how I used to say, “Oh, why couldn’t they just trust?” and how now that I am not a child anymore, I say, “I so get why you complained and wondered if you should head back to slavery in Egypt, Israelites. Because at least in Egypt, you weren’t slapping diapers on rocks and eating what-is-it that falls from the sky and wishing your infant son would just go to sleeeeeep.”

I so get it. But then I remember to take it a day at a time, to wait for manna, to not second-guess God’s call for us to go in and take the Promised Land. So here’s one day lived in the desert, in which everything is provided and everything happens under God’s sovereignty. And here’s one day that I am grateful is finally coming to a close because grace is new every morning.

We’re in the grocery store yesterday, and Steven says, “Megan, he really wants to hold the list. Are you done with it?” Yeah, I tell him, I’m done. So he hands Ezra the list to destroy. By the time we get to the check-out, there is a piece missing.

Yikes.

We’re watching his diaper for all kinds of weird things lately, mostly solid food (his newest endeavor), but eventually I’ll probably see the end of my grocery list. It’s fascinating to me, poop. Turns out, our systems have to learn to digest with practice. Things often come out… recognizable.

What can I say? I’m the mom of a 6 month old. Poop is life right now.

We began adventures in solids with purees. To be honest, I was extremely disappointed with his first solid meal. I had pureed some sugar pumpkins left over from our Halloween party, mixed in some breast milk, and it seemed like a decent consistency. Ezra was not excited. He was actually really frustrated by the end, and so was I, in turn. Like, he was screaming at the end. And I was sighing and rolling my eyes.

It wasn’t because the pumpkin wasn’t tasty. He was loving the flavor, as long as it was going in his mouth under his control. This is about how every single bite went.

Our battle for control resulted in pureed pumpkin flung all over the kitchen. We finished that meal, and I sat back and rubbed my forehead, which I soon realized was covered in pumpkin. This did not go well, I thought. Food is not supposed to be a daily nightmare. There was something innate in Ezra, at this age, that I was trying to bypass by spoonfeeding him. It felt really unnatural, like I was wearing sequins because it’s all the rage and everyone says so, even though it’s not my style. And I resolved to rethink a method of introducing solids that I had considered, then dismissed.

It’s called baby-led solids, or baby-led weaning. Put simply, we skipped purees and went straight for finger foods. It sounds like of hippy, I’ll admit. But I’ll also admit I’m a bit of a hippy anyway, and always have been. Sometimes I think this is why God’s put me in Colorado, and kept me here. I don’t relish going against the grain, and maybe He knows that. So he set the stage for my mothering career in a place where I’m surrounded by other hippy moms who cloth diaper and breastfeed and follow alternative vaccine schedules.

So it works for us.

We postponed solids for a couple of days while I read up on it. In the meantime, Ezra is lunging at my lunch and sticking everything in his mouth, making chomping faces, and screaming when we take away the stolen piece of bread from Steven’s plate. In the end, Steven and I decided to try it out. I watched videos of babies my Ezra’s age eating slices of avocados, watched them gag, learning the difference between gagging and choking, watched them move food from the back of their mouths to the front, and make chewing motions to cope. We teach baby to chew first, then we teach them to swallow, and we rely on the God-given gag reflex. We don’t override it.

It’s not how my mama did it, so it feels like I’m actin’ too big for my britches, thinking I know what I’m doing here. But maybe that’s why motherhood is so intimidating and, often, guilt-ridden. We mother in the shadow of giants, the women who nursed us and changed us and loved us and kept their sanity somewhat intact along the way. They answered for our well-being, and now we answer for the well-being of these new, fragile, little people. And here I am squeaking in their beautiful shadows, “You did the right thing with me. Now I have to do the right thing with my babies! We’re gonna skip purees! Squeak!”

Day one of baby-led solids was a great success, and a lot of fun. We started with steamed apples. Ezra smashed and sucked and even got a few pieces good and gummed and swallowed. Here he is at the beginning, before he really destroyed the apple. I had steamed it to the point that whatever he got in his mouth, it would disintegrate. It’s messy, but it’s a good way to start.

And then we tried avocados. I found an almost overripe one, cut it into sixths, and put three pieces down on his tray. I left the skins on so that he would have something to grip, but he quickly figured out how to separate the skins from the flesh. After he scraped every bit of avocado from the skins and threw them to the floor, I dusted the remaining slippery pieces of avocado with Cheerio dust to make them more grippable. And put a couple of Cheerios on his tray for kicks.

I also offered him more pureed pumpkin. This time, I omitted the breast milk to make it less soupy, and gave it to him on a pre-loaded spoon to put in his own mouth. Things went much better this time around, and there were no tears, though I did have quite a mess to clean up. He was happy, but purees on a pre-loaded spoon make for an amazing mess afterwards. So they’re not mommy’s favorite.

We did steamed carrot sticks tonight. I forgot to take pictures. It was quite a bit less messy, and more actually made it into his mouth and down his throat. So practice makes perfect. He was extremely upset at the beginning, which was due, in part, to a long and stimulating day and impending bedtime. He was picking up the carrots and hurling them away from him. Does he not like carrots? I thought. On a whim, I pretended to extract a carrot stick from my soup bowl (we had pasta fagioli tonight. yum.), and set it on his tray. Same carrot, but now it looks like it came from mommy’s dinner. And it did, in a way. I had just set aside a carrot to steam apart from our soup. He immediately stopped screaming, cooed like, “OK, thank you. That’s what I was trying to tell you. I want what you’re having,” picked up the carrot and gummed it from one end to the other. A little bit made it down his throat. Most of it either got washed out of his neck rolls at bath time or wiped out of the various nooks and crannies of his high chair. Practice makes perfect.

He also really loves to drink out of a cup. He holds it and I tilt it for him. I offered a straw sippy the other day, and he got a few sips from that, but he is more excited about doing things like we do them. Every time we take a sip of our own glasses, I can almost hear the gears turning in his head. He’s calculating every movement, and every time I give him the chance to mimic, I’m so impressed with our funny little boy. He’s growing so fast. He’s smart and goofy, and so confident and at-ease with life. I love watching facets of his personality surface–he reminds me a lot of his daddy. Very determined, intelligent, quietly confident, strong but gentle, watches in order to learn. We will see who he turns out to be.

So this is how solids are going for us. There are pears ripening on the counter for our next taste test! For mommies who are interested, there are books out there on the topic of baby-led weaning, but I really loved this blog in particular. She does a fantastic job of chronicling each new food adventure, and also has some videos of her baby trying different foods at different ages.

http://baby-led-solids.blogspot.com/