Day 22. Year 3.

I'm going for a quick, light and airy post tonight. :) Partly because I am just done thinking and feeling tonight... and partly because they are so fun to write.

There is nothing better than a happy Vicki. And nothing makes Vicki happier than when 'baking' is on her visual schedule. What was on the menu tonight? Blue's Banana Muffins. :) We decided to bake this homemade concoction in those little baby bread tins, so adorable!  We've tried a lot of different muffin recipes but keep going back to the recipe in the back of an old Blue's Clues book we have. Besides the yummy taste, my favorite thing about this recipe is that it is very visual and Vicki has a really easy time following it. There is a matching picture to word in each step of the recipe. And it shows the measuring cups and spoons as well. I love that Vicki is starting to read recipes! Another set of recipe books that we love are the "look and cook" books. The step by step directions and pictures that accompany them are fabulous. I think Vicki (and mommy) learn a lot from them!

We've tried to teach Vicki a lot of functional things through her love of food. Sometimes it works to our advantage, other times it does not. It's amazing how many things you can do with food to teach basic concepts to children. For example... you can start with very basic things such as colors. And shapes. And 1:1 correspondence with math items. Then you can teach categories... we have lots and lots (probably at least 100..) of laminated food cards that Vicki uses... sometimes we use the cards as reinforcers themselves... Vicki loves looking at all of the different foods. We use them for teaching new sight words, we use them for teaching categories... give me all the fruits... give me all the foods that are red... Then she moves onto more conversational items... tell me 4 fruits that are green. The first fruit she said today? Kiwi. Ahhh... I love that girl! Then she came up with grapes, watermelon, and gosh, I can't think of a fourth one right now, but she did... You can teach attributes with food... hot/cold, long/short, heavy/light, soft/hard... etc... We've taken bins of rice for sensory play and started teaching her basic fractions..filling 1 cup of rice... 1/2 cup of rice...etc... You can teach fine motor skills, gross motor skills, following 1-2-3 step directions... the list goes on and on... Sometimes the only limit is my lack of creativity.

But the thing I like the best about cooking with Vicki, and I'm sure I've said this before, is that when Vicki is cooking and baking... she is right there with me. She is engaged. She is happy. And she looks adorable in her apron. ;) And every time we are in the kitchen, Vicki surprises me with something... no matter how little it is... she is always showing me something new... she is always making decisions... And try as I might to stop her, she is always licking the bowl. :)

Like I said, Vicki listens and follows directions really well, in the kitchen. :) She knows where just about every ingredient is housed and enjoys getting each of them out. She loves dumping the ingredients in the bowl and she loves stirring. She was really into stirring tonight, and she did a good job when stirring the flour gets difficult. We got to mash up some frozen bananas for tonight's recipe; she loves doing that. And Vicki has really been using her sniffer a lot lately... she loved taking a whiff of the vanilla and the bananas. She is careful when she spoons the mixture into the pans and if I forget something, she will tell me. Tonight I almost forgot to spray the pans... and Vicki's way of alerting me was... woah. woooah. woahhhh. Mommy. Spray. Please.

Sometimes if Vicki is really excited, she will plop down right in front of the oven and I'll turn the oven light on for her. She will sit there and watch the dessert bake. :) Other times... she will happily skip into the living room and play Barbies while she is waiting.

I love the smell of a good banana bread baking. And so does Vicki. When the bread was ready to eat Vicki opened the fridge and got out the spray redi-whip. Spray redi-whip is a staple in our house. Snow storm a' coming? Get the toilet paper. Get the bread. Get the milk. And get the redi-whip! :) You know that 'Frank's hot sauce' jingle... I put that **** on everything. Vicki could do a commercial for redi-whip just like that. :) And one of the things I love to do is ask her where she wants me to spray the redi-whip. I know I shouldn't do this.... but there are certain phrases... when they come out of Vicki's mouth, you just can't help but smile... And when I ask her where she wants the redi-whip.. she'll point and say, 'right there. right there'. It is seriously one of the most adorable things ever.

Now there are pitfalls and fears in the kitchen as well that we work on. Lots of them center on safety... knowing when things are hot and not to touch them and the big one now is that she is trying to be so independent and she is so darn quick... she will reach for a knife before you even know it. And that scares the begeezers out of me. I like that word. I don't like being scared because she is so impulsive. Other things that we are working on is trying not to keep letting her open the fridge just to open the fridge and stare inside of it. I remember when I was little, my mom would hate it when I would open the fridge door and just stare inside and not know what I wanted. Vicki, well, she just likes to look in the fridge. Everything interests her in there. And when she opens the fridge for a purpose, I have no problem... but when she wants to get in the fruit bin drawer every 5 minutes to look at the mango... that does become an issue. So we came up with a little dry erase board  mounted on the fridge... we have a picture of a fridge with the door open taped to it... and we have 5 boxes drawn. Every time Vicki opens the fridge for pleasure... she has to put a check mark in one of the boxes... when she gets to 5, that's it. She's done. Luckily we've only gotten to 5 once and that was right at bedtime. Maybe she is understanding it, or maybe I am too lenient. ;) That's also a possibility.

Another thing we did with food.. .is that we were noticing that she wanted to bake every night. Of course, who wouldn't want to? And if we just had the generic 'dessert' picture on her schedule she would get really upset if we offered her fruit for dessert. Because hey man, dessert is dessert. A pastry, a cookie, a brownie... Fruit, not so much. And all it took to get Vicki to eat fruit for dessert? Printing up some laminated fruit pictures to put on her visual schedule in place of the dessert picture. And when she sees that cantelope picture in the morning... oh my... she gets so excited. :)  So sometimes it's the simplies of changes that can influence positive behavior.

Well, I guess this wasn't quick. But it was fun. I guess I didn't say much in this post, but there are a lot of words. I have to apologize, too,  because the spell check is not working right now...

... and just like I said in my last post about food... I have a few ideas floating around that I want to write a post on soon... well, I guess it better be soon... I only have one week to go on my 30 days this year... Wow! That was fast!  (I really hope you are enjoying reading my blog this month.)

I love that Vicki has discovered her passion. And I love that she lets me share her passion with her. I hope you are enjoying me sharing my passion with you. xoxo