Well I’ve been having a bit of a freak out period the last few days. My son’s awesome daycare provides snacks, and they are usually fairly healthy but last time I dropped him off right at snack time and he was given Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I love Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but it is definitely just pure sugar. He was happy as a clam so I didn’t think anything of it. He usually has cheese crackers or those veggie stick puffs and I’m sure the CTC was just a one off treat. Anyway, a couple days later I mentioned it to Will offhand, and Will (who abhors cereal – if you want to waste 3 hours of your life, just use the words “cereal is part of a balanced breakfast”) said something like “we should probably provide his snacks”. Will is usually pretty chill about this stuff so it freaked me out. Julius gets really bad eczema so controlling all his food may help us figure out what causes flair ups.
Julius has also become increasingly more picky at mealtimes. We’ve all seen the kids whose parents make them entree after entree for dinner until they finally eat one of them, and we REALLY don’t want to end up with that kid. We also have friends who have extremely limited palettes and we don’t want that either. So I started googling. I hate the internet, I really do. Anyway, we’ve apparently been doing everything wrong – we give him a rotation of the same 5 things for lunch or dinner. Will and I don’t eat dinner until 9pm most nights because we don’t have time to make dinner for everyone after work until Julius is in bed. So we make Julius a quick dinner – grilled cheese, chicken nuggets, meatballs, tortellini, avocados and hardboiled eggs are our go-tos. Sometimes we’ll give him leftovers from our meal the night before but I make a lot of Indian and Mexican food and I make it spicy. We can’t give him that.
So now I’ve decided I need to make dinners Julius can eat or else he’s going to become picky. We also decided we have to spend extra time preparing his snacks for the next day or else he’s going to only want sugar. Today I attempted to make dinner when I was by myself with Julius after work and I made him beet pancakes (one of our favorites). Even though I did all the prep work the night before it still took a long time to make them while watching Julius. The result? Julius ended up in bed a solid hour late. He didn’t like them at first, but after I put a bit of sour cream on each piece he ate quite a bit of it. I consider that a win, even though fried anything is not exactly healthy. Maybe I’ll just give up and sail the seven seas. Good thing I created a pattern for a Jolly Roger for such an occasion! We gave my dad a Jolly Roger for the pontoon boat for his birthday, so I decided to make the flag myself. Now, you can too!
DIY Jolly Roger
What you’ll need:
- 1/2 yard black “Sport Nylon”
- 1/3 yard (or less) white “Sport Nylon”
- 13″ of 2″ wide trim
- 2 extra large eyelets
- Black machine embroidery thread
- 505 temporary adhesive spray
- dissolvable stabilizer
- Embroidery pattern here (note the pattern is zipped, so you’ll need to unzip it after you download it)
- Cut a rectangle of black fabric 13.5×17″.
- Press 17″ long edge of fabric 3/8″.
- Press again 3/8″.
- Repeat steps 2 and 3 for other 17″ long side and one of the 13.5″ sides.
- Pin and stitch along three seams.
- Place trim on fabric and fold 1/2″ of end of trim around the flag. Repeat for opposite end of trim. Fold the whole length of trim in half so unfinished edge of fabric is completely enclosed. Pin & Stitch.
- Insert a large eyelet at each corner of the trim following package instructions.
- Hoop your fabric with embroidery hoop at the center of flag, using the dissolvable stabilizer.
- Stitch the first set of stitches, the placement stitches. Remove hoop from embroidery machine and cut two pieces of white nylon larger than the placement stitches. Spray the back with 505 and adhere to the front of the hoop and the back of the hoop on top of the placement stitches.
- Stitch the second set of stitches to tack down your skull and crossbones. Remove hoop from embroidery machine and cut very close to the tacking stitches. Make sure to cut out the eye and nose holes.
- Stitch the third set of stitches to satin stitch around the skull and crossbones. Remove from embroidery hoop and trim jump stitches and rip out tacking stitches that remain in the cross bones.
Front of hoop view
Back of hoop view
- Dissolve stabilizer remaining.
- Hoist the jolly roger! (But please don’t do any actual pirating.)
Finding food that a) doesn’t require a lot of chewing, b) is healthy, and c) is delicious is so hard! We’re also trying to cook 1 dinner for the 3 of us, but it’s really challenging. A lot of our favorites don’t always hit the first 2.
Maybe the real question we should be asking is – will it blend?! But yes, it is so hard to find foods Julius will eat!
I want the best pancake recipe
Will and I spent several minutes trying to figure out what the best pancake recipe was. Then we realized you meant beet pancakes! Here it is: https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/beet-and-carrot-pancakes-5110 I don’t put carrots in, because this is a way to use lots of beets.
Haha autocorrect wins again … Although to be fair, I want to know your thoughts on the BEST pancakes too.