I love food. This is a fact. In the years of travel with my family as I grew up, we would enjoy food from all over America. There is a problem that comes with travel cuisine. When you go home you can’t get the different foods you find that you love. Therefore, when we travel we have to include food as an activity. This is never more true than with a trip to the Southwest where we get our favorite Mexican food. When we travel to New Mexico and Colorado we hunt down sopapillas.

The trick to finding good sopapillas is to ask locals for the best locations. This trip we found out that restaurants are now stuffing them with taco toppings, but the best way to eat them is to fill them with honey. We found two places that served great sopapillas in the areas we were visiting. Restaurants used to serve them in baskets before meals like some do with tortilla chips. The best we could find were that some restaurants served them as dessert and you could buy more individual sopapillas. The ones we ate made our fingers sticky, cut the spicy kick from our mouths, and made our stomachs full. The biggest disappointment was that Julia didn’t fall in love with them. She tried one bite both times, but passed on the sweet dessert. Emily could manage one each time.

Robby’s family traveled to northern New Mexico when he was a child and their family discovered a favorite restaurant in Taos. We had to stop and try it out. After hearing the stories repeated over and over we were sure that it would struggle to measure up to the hype. We are pleased to say that both their Mexican food was fantastic but so were their sopapillas. The girls tried the Mexican French Toast which was Uncle Doug’s favorite thing to eat there at age three.

Emily eating her Mexican French Toast, which was cinnamon nut bread made into French Toast. Sounded pretty good.

While I love mashed potatoes I think we will not be having them at our household for a while. Emily turned tonight’s dinner into artwork instead of being eaten. I didn’t pick a battle over it and just let her not eat. As Robby and I watched the mashed potato “castle” being built it seemed to become JR Tolkien’s dragon Smaug from The Hobbit. It was adorned with peas and dressing. The additions really looked like scales and a little aging. We convinced Emily to call it Castle Smaug and joked that it was the throne under the mountain.

When it appeared that she was done decorating I took this photo. I told her that it was safe to eat now that we had a photo. She asked to see the photo and I promised that after she ate Smaug I would let her. She promptly picked up her fork and took a bite. I walked away in wonder at my good luck. I wish I could claim credit for my plan, but I can’t. But maybe I will be able to use it again at some point.

We were enjoying our taco dinner at Jolie’s and Julia decided that her olives needed to dance. She put one on each finger and then started waving them around. It was so funny! Who knows if they were to dance or if they were little people who were having a conversation. Whatever it was she was thrilled with them and her little activity.

Emily was learning how to use chopsticks to eat her dinner. Grammy was helping me out, so that I could offer attention to Julia. Emily was very enthusiastic about wanting to use chopsticks, but couldn’t hold it tight all the way to her mouth without help. She ate shrimp and squash with the chopsticks and the broth soup and rice with the soup spoon. She seemed to really enjoy the dinner as long as the cook didn’t make any fireballs.

Our daily life changes as often as Julia does, but we enjoy it. Our morning routine when we are spending it at home is pretty relaxed and full of play, cartoons, jammies, and breakfast. Emily will ask for breakfast when she is ready and Julia wants to eat just about an hour after her morning milk.

Emily’s breakfast options are generally waffles, eggs, cereal, toast, bagels (if we have them), or oatmeal. She goes through periods of favoring each of these options. She has only recently started to eat cereal with milk. It is a trick to learn to use a spoon for cereal and milk. She hasn’t mastered it, but she enjoys the food even though it is messy and requires help sometimes. We got Chinese soup spoons to help her hold the milk and food a little bit safer for the trip from her bowl to her mouth. She likes her special spoons and likes having a little more success.

Julia’s breakfast options are yogurt, oatmeal, baby food with baby cereal, or bits of Mommy’s breakfast. Julia has started to eat a lot of finger foods, but breakfast doesn’t have much self feeding. She likes to pull chunky bites back out of her mouth to redeposit it back in. It is like she wonders what she is feeling in her mouth so she wants to touch it with her fingers. When we eat the yogurt she makes the funniest faces. I wonder if the taste of the yogurt encourages it or if she is just having fun playing. She also figured out how to sip/slurp yogurt from the spoon. It’s funny, but she hasn’t repeated it with anyone around other than Emily and I. She also snacks on Cheerios, baby food puffs, and rice cereal when I’m finishing my breakfast.

Here’s another photo of Julia post-meal. Prior to this photo we scrubbed her face, hands, arms, legs, feet, seat, and table. It was on my way back to her that I decided we need another photo of her. Obviously, we had been eating peas. The bib is so applicable, ‘Let’s do lunch. Its on me”. I’m allowing Julia to get a lot more messy than I allowed Emily to get at this stage.

This was the first meal that we had a moment of recognition that ‘there is a spoon with food on it and I want it in my mouth’ occurred. It was brief and then she returned to the games of not opening her mouth, being distracted by everything in the room, and where’s sister.