Almond Joy

First order of business today: reassure everyone (and myself) that I am not crazy, weak, or a "bad mother" (what an awful, loaded phrase). I just have a baby with acid reflux. Yeah. That explains it. So now that we have some handy dandy medication, my little one is not in near as much pain. He sleeps a little better (he's on the bed...asleep...right now! Quiet squeee!), can actually be put down now and then when he's awake, and is quite the charmer.

See? Even asleep he's happier!

All celebrations aside, I still have to be careful to keep him as comfortable as possible. Hence the post about... (drumroll please...) almonds!

Just like newborn Cambrie's was, little James's stomach is sensitive to the things that I eat. Specifically, if I drink milk (in a smoothie or on my cereal), I had better be prepared for a heckuva-next-24-hours. My solution? Homemade almond milk. Mmmm.

I'm not going to say it's better than regular milk, but I like it well enough--and it sure makes me happy when I get those few moments to make it with Cambrie when James is asleep. The house is (relatively) quiet, and we can just be the girls, together.

I love watching her little-big-girl hands dumping the almonds in the blender, squeezing the honey bear, pushing the blender buttons, and helping me pour. I (usually) love her constant chatter, stories, and silliness. I love to have her help--it's one of the things in life that just, plain and simple, makes me smile.

You can see some of the almond milk in the jar. The glass pan has the leftover almond meal, which I dry out in the oven then freeze.

Cambrie will beg to help with anything and everything in the kitchen. I sometimes have to scramble to find things for her to do, since tasks like chopping or stirring pasta into boiling water are a little...umm...unwise for a barely-three-year-old. We've learned she likes to arrange chopped fruit and veggies on a plate, stir non-scalding mixes and batters, and scoop things. Like almond meal.

The almond meal, it turns out, is great for gluten-free baking. Since Patrick's grandma has started a gluten-free diet, we've been searching for yummy alternatives to recipes that typically include wheat flour. These almond meal cookies were a big hit--their texture is sort of macaroon-ish. Even Patrick liked them, and he has a strict no-raisins-in-cookies-or-anywhere-else policy. (Our deal was next time we'll do them with chocolate chips.)

They look chunkier than the ones from the original recipe, probably because I used homemade and not store bought  almond meal. I could probably grind it finer if I really felt like it.

Cambrie also helped to scoop some of the almond-meal-cookie-dough onto the baking sheet, by the way. I wonder when I'll be able to have her baking cookies completely on her own--age four? Five? What, overly ambitious? Pshaw. You should see this girl with a bowl of ingredients. She can mix.

Oh, and in case anyone actually follows that link to try the cookies, here are some things I'll try next time: I'll probably use a little less sugar (they were really sweet). Also, I'm going to try throwing some oats in there to make the almond meal go further and try to improve upon the texture. I recommend lightly greasing the cookie sheet.

So, despite the wandering tendency of this post, here's the gist of it:

My baby is much happier nowadays thanks to medicine for his acid reflux. This leaves more time for me to spend with Cambrie, and more time to experiment with the by-product of the almond milk that I make with her--the almond milk that is also for baby James's benefit. Also, those almond meal cookies are really yummy.

Yikes. Yeah, focus isn't my strong point today.

But that's okay, because when I'm done with my scatterbrained post, I have a three-year-old to wrestle with and to tell me her dreams about being able to fly and a two-month-old to snuggle with and to give me the biggest baby grins I've ever seen. That's worth a scatter-brained post or two.