lesson learned

i thought i'd be really clever and make dinner early today. see, johnny has a bit of a cranky time from 4ish until bath time at 6. and of course that coincides with my cooking time and makes for a disaster in the kitchen. so here i go today, thinking i'm so smart and organized. i started dinner around one o'clock after johnny started his nap. being me, i was of course trying a new recipe. something with too many things to chop and stir and blend and all the rest. 30 minutes later he was up. i'm not going to get started on how i have no idea how to cure my son's short nap syndrome. another day.

so i gave him some food, changed his diaper, made sure he was good and happy, and put him in his little jungle gym thingy as close to the kitchen without being in the kitchen as he could possibly be (and that's not hard in my little apt) so that i could get on with things. i mean we were practically holding hands.

we're good, right J? nooooooo way. nope. he was soooooooo fussy. he just jumped and fussed and fussed and jumped until i decided he was ready for another nap. these pictures were actually taken on another day when he wasn't totally ticked-off. but just so you get the idea.

and now i'm going to cut this long story short. we went back and forth like this until the end of the evening when there was nothing left to do but strip him down to his baggy underwear and take pictures... hoping to delay bath time until dad got home from work so that he could take over.

we may or may not have had a fight over the remote control which J clearly won.

so what did we learn today? johnny's fussy time is whenever i'm in the kitchen cooking dinner AND from 4ish til bathtime... so, better to overlap the two as to avoid TWO fussy times and a 6-hour dinner prep! but lucky for me, i love the little guy so dang much that i could go without dinner and trying new recipes altogether and still be happy.

And finally, i have to report on the brussel sprouts from my previous post. sadly, i ignored the advice i was given on how to cook them because i couldn't bare to stand in front of the oven and saute them with a fussy baby on my hip. so i followed this recipe and tossed them in the oven, which was easier but reeeeeaaaaallly not that good. darn.