Breakfast with Andrew

After Andrew’s Sunday morning gym class, we usually go out to breakfast. I typically order this thin little breakfast panini that, in order to be marketed as healthy, is very tiny. So I am finished with my meal about 2 minutes after we are served and get to spend the next 20-30 minutes watching Andrew go to town on his (second) breakfast. This week we opted to give him a muffin because the last few times when he got a bagel he spent much of the time trying to convince us he should take possession of the knife and apply the cream cheese himself. We disagreed.

So this week we bore witness to the Andrew method of muffin eating. It involves picking off the crusty top edges (I was happy to eat those) and face planting into the remaining pastry. It is a good way to get muffin crumbs in your eyelashes and eyebrows. It also takes an extremely long time to devour a muffin this way, but he resolutely refused our offers to break the muffin into bits.  As far as drawn-out breakfasts go it was amusing, but next time I am going to order a second panini.

 

(This is one of two expressions Andrew makes when we ask him to smile for the camera.  The other is a less toothy/scrunchy version, on display below in the picture of him sitting with the cookie tray at the kitchen table.)

Cookies!

On a recent cold January Sunday afternoon we turned to baking chocolate chip cookies for indoor amusement.  Andrew was very helpful dumping ingredients in the bowl, turning on the mixer, and putting dough balls on the tray with a spoon.  He made numerous attempts to eat dough, most of which I thwarted.  Not pictured in this series of idyllic mother-son photos: Andrew rejecting his final baked good product and spitting/dribbling a chewed up cookie into my hand.  Lovely.  I guess it's up to mommy to finish off this batch.  I can live with that.

Shout out to Aunt Colleen for the fabulous elephant apron from Thailand.

Model Trains

This weekend Andrew has been playing with a container full of plastic train tracks that we didn't bother to give him on his birthday because enough was enough.  That lasted all of 13 days until he saw it in a corner of our room and said "open, open, open, open" until I complied.

The problem with this toy is that the time it takes to assemble a track and the time it takes for Andrew to lose interest in a toy are roughly equal.  Also, Andrew is wary of the two electric trains that run on little motorized wheels, and Greg and I find them a lot cooler than the manual ones.  We have trouble resisting playing with them and that inevitably drives Andrew from the room.  Nevertheless, we have had a lot of fun with this over the past couple of days.