37/52

a portrait of my son, once a week, every week in 2016

Jimmy: Wanna help Daddy.

Jimmy loves being involved in the things we do and especially in the kitchen. It started with the dishes and while that continues, Jimmy is interested in helping make food and taste all the ingredients. Yes. Even corn flour. Here, Jimmy is helping Daddy grind up some pork, prunes, and bread for pork pie.

Last week, in photos...

Drawing inspiration from here, here, and here, I'm hoping to share a little of my week using photos. Hopefully I'll manage five photos as a minimum, and hopefully I'll manage to get them up before Sunday, but I'm not going to be upset with myself if it goes up on Monday...

Speaking of Monday: First day back at work for the new year required coffee. Real coffee and a peanut butter cookie.

Honey-soy chicken for dinner. It was excellent, but there was not enough for leftovers, for lunch the next day.

Jimmy rediscovered one of his favourite books and we spent at least two days reading it over and over again.

My new diary arrived! It's tiny but so bright and cheery and I love the pictures. It's a little perfect.

A recent Jimmy-photo of me. I know it's blurry. Don't care.

Cutting with the kitchen scissors. Jimmy is getting good at cutting.

Riley County Fair 2015...

Given how much I was looking forward to taking Jimmy to the County Fair, you'd think I would have had the photos up the very next day...

Clearly not. Let's blame the heat, shall we?

It is nearly 3 months since the Country Fair and here they are, with a few words sprinkled in between. I find it strange to look at them now, Jimmy's hair damp with sweat because it was after 7 pm and still well over 35 C - although it's still not cold here yet, it is hard to remember how hot it was in July. Anyway... Photos!

Dinner... Our neighbours, the ones who took us to Wamego and who we celebrated the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival with, were heading to the Fair in the evening, aiming to meet up with some other friends, catch the barbeque dinner, and take in the Rodeo. We went along but were not committed to going to the Rodeo - we have a restless two year old...

After dinner (thanks to local pork producers) we found refuge from the heat (and it was hot...) in the air conditioning of Pottorf Hall, where we admired the displays, enjoyed feeling normal, and I struggled to get my camera settings right... Arg...

Oh, just, you know, the biggest kohl rabi ever! Well, at the 2015 Riley County Fair...

Jimmy perked up and found some energy... It was hot outside, even after 7 pm, even after 8 pm...

This cardigan and yarn caught my eye, but no one would need either of them for a few months.

Insect collections... I'm going to have to start one - if 4H members can do it, then so can I.

After looking at all the displays, and realising that we had to get Jimmy away from the cakes that he wasn't allowed to eat (they were entered into the cake decoration category and they were very good), we extracted ourselves from the aircon and made for the animals... It was worth it.

And then my camera battery died. I had thought it would happen, but hadn't acted on the thought to charge the battery, because it seems to last forever, until I'm somewhere were I really, really, want to take photos... Ah well...

So, with no camera, Michael was on camera duty, so this one (above) and the last one (below) were taken by him. The light was fading, the sun setting and we didn't go to the rodeo. We checked out the rides, but didn't go on any of them.

It was still hot.

Jimmy was ok, tired but ok. We thought about walking home because Jimmy was asking to go to home, but it was too hot... so we waited for our friends and neighbours to return from the Rodeo.

As the night wore on, Jimmy forgot his fatigue and decided that he'd investigate the 4H dance: he wandered away from where we were sitting and didn't look back until he was halfway between (and we played a cruel trick, and were hiding behind some trees, clearly watching him). We caught up with him before he reached the entrance and we returned to our little spot and watched the fireflies, while keeping hydrated. It was still hot.

Here are last year's photos.

And if you don't believe me when I say it was hot go here and skip to July 24, 2015: 39 C... hot.

Over the weekend we...

Ate homemade sourdough hot cross buns... More soon...

 And went Geocaching along the Linear Trail, walking about 5 km over the course of the day...

 Spring is well and truly here, with most plants showing signs of new growth...

 It was a lovely day, until the wind picked up, and it was like icicles cutting our skin, even through jumpers... 

 It was great to get out for a walk and explore a few parts of Manhattan, KS, we haven't seen before...

We saw cyclists, joggers, and other families out walking and enjoying the lovely weather...

 Jimmy was a little inspired by the joggers and wanted to run...

 Daddy joined in...

 And then Jimmy was a little tired and distracted. Oh well, that's what the Manduca is for - tired bubba's...

We kept going, and came across Wild Cat Creek, where my camera battery decided that I had been neglecting it... Oops! So, no photos of the cool footbridge we used to get across the creek, no photos of our snacks, which included hot cross buns with butter, and no photos of my leaking water bottle... It's dead... I might have a go at fixing it... We'll see...

 On Sunday we went for a picnic at Frank Anneberg Park, with our neighbours, who also gave us a lift, and a few others. This was after staying up far too late on Saturday night setting up a tunnel extravaganza for Jimmy, which included toys, tickle grass, little pine cones, snacks, emergency exits, his "down blocks", and some coloured hard boiled eggs. It was better than it sounds. And for a few hours it was the only way to get out of our bedroom... We'll be doing it again...

Michael wanted to take some pictures of Jimmy all dressed up for the picnic (thanks for the overalls Granny!). Jimmy decided to mess with Daddy...

 Michael really does have a way with the camera and Jimmy...

 It was another windy day, possibly windier... But a good time was had by all. There was yummy food to eat, turkey vultures and Canadian geese to watch, and we even threw a frisbee around, although sometimes it just hovered, held in position by the wind... 

Jimmy checked his pockets for sand, and sure enough there was a little sand in them. He and I discussed how dirt is different from mud, and I tried to tell him that dirt is important, not "yucky" (he was still happy to play in it), but I think it's a topic we will have to revisit... Once I'm over my cold... All that fresh air and exercise... Who would have thought? 

Manhattan, KS, in the snow...

Or at least the parts we see regularly... 

Last Monday we woke up to snow. That Tuesday we woke up to even more snow and then in the afternoon there was the most amazing snow drifting and swirling and dancing around. You can tell I'm from a part of the world where it doesn't snow, right?

Well, after a few failed attempts to get out and take photos of the snow covered landscape, Jimmy and I did it! On Wednesday we had a lunch date to keep, a DVD from the library to return, so with the promise of going on a noisy bus I convinced Jimmy that all the fuss was going to be worth it.

This post is fairly photo heavy, so you'll need to press the "read more" link after another photo or two...

With Jimmy all rugged up and in the Manduca ("du-a" as Jimmy says), we were off and taking photos of the snow covered landscape!

7/52

a portrait of my son, once a week, every week in 2015

Jimmy: Pasta! Cheese! Vroom!

Yes... I have resorted to making car noises to get Jimmy's attention so that he will eat most, if not all, his breakfast, lunch, and dinner... It's not that Jimmy doesn't like his food - he loves it - it's just that lately he gets to a point in the meal where he stops eating but is happy to be fed. This usually happens around the time when Michael has finished his meal. Once upon a time I would have just let Jimmy play with his food and that would be that, but he needs more than breastmilk and I am encouraging Jimmy to eat more solids in the hope that he will rely less and less on breastmilk during the day (so days this works better than others). So, vroom!

If you hadn't already guessed, Michael took this photo while I was feeding Jimmy his lunch. Jimmy had already fed himself quite a bit of the pasta, although some of it made it to his ear before it found its way into his mouth...

Cheap thrills: Brioche...

As I mentioned yesterday, I have been making sourdough brioche. It's good - I can't believe I didn't make it sooner. Admittedly I thought it was going to be a little fiddly, so I was happy to wait until Asha was visiting so that there was another set of hands to help with Jimmy.

There was no reason to worry about Jimmy, but I was right about the fiddle... This may have had more to do with the recipe I used than anything else, but it was worth it.

After a quick search online, this is the recipe I used. There were others, and I intend to try out this one and this one too (along with some waffle recipes, but that's another story for another day). For the recipe I used, I still needed to search for some methods...

I followed the recipe to the letter, with one exception: I used lemon rind but no lemon essence. The dough was more like cake batter, especially after incorporating the butter using frissage. And the French folds? Well, that was a mess.

I lost a lot of mixture because it was all over my hands and the bench (and we didn't get any photos of the webs of dough between my fingers). Did I mention it was like kneading cake batter?

When I went to bed I was little concerned about how it would all go. Hoping the dough wouldn't rise too fast I turned our heating down ~1 C, but I could have left it as it was.

This is what the brioche looked like in the morning. Not promising, but I went with it. After drizzling a beaten egg white and a little milk, I 'cut' down the middle of the dough. Imagine cutting through cake batter... And into the oven it went!

The recipe made no mention of using a water bath in the oven, but I put one in for 7 minutes. A water bath helps with the initial rising of the bread, and I use a shallow pan with boiling water on the lowest rack in the oven - a quick spray of water will also do the trick. Using the water bath added 10 minutes to the overall cooking time.

The result? It rose beautifully, smelled amazing, and the crumb... oh my goodness...

Jimmy approved too! And we ate it all that day. Ok, we ate most of it for breakfast.

It was also so good that I made it again for Asha, for breakfast, the morning before her early morning flight to LA.