Peanut butter + jelly without the jelly

I had a dream (don't you just love it when people tell you all about your dreams?-- I know, it'll be short + painless, I promise) where something was happening that I should have been worrying about. In the dream I was worrying about why I wasn't worrying, and then when I first woke up I was worrying about having a dream about worrying about not worrying. Crazy.

Anyhow, I've been worrying about too much and I've been too hard on myself. This Mama/being at home with the babe stuff is tough stuff sometimes. I love it, even the more difficult moments, but there aren't any sort of standardized units of measurement for success. The boy is happy and healthy and brilliant (!) so that is the big success. The little things, at times, seem a bit out of control though and at the moment there are a lot of little things.

So, one thing that's been bugging me is our food situation. One of the boys around here can't have any dairy at all in anything, and the other (bigger) guy has had to try a wheat-, gluten- and dairy-free diet lately. It feels like we cycle through the same ten or so meals all the time, and though I'm in love with the new kitchen I think I hate to cook lately (and you can't, um, actually cook on the boy's cute stove). It's hard to find combos that will suit everyone's dietary needs and I always feel like I need to cut corners at the grocery store to save a little money.

This morning:
"Did you eat some breakfast?"
"Ummm... I had a little applesauce."
"No cereal?"
"Aah, no... There isn't actually any cereal left."

Yesterday morning as I'm sticking cold cuts onto plain tortillas as "wraps":
"Sorry for the pathetic lunch. I guess I could have made these into peanut butter and jelly tortilla wraps?"
"Do we have jelly?!"
"Um, no. They'd be peanut butter and jelly wraps without the jelly."
"Oh... No, that's fine."

Anyhow, time for an intervention. I found lots of cookbooks for inspiration at the library (Book Babies yesterday, of course, and can I just add in how adorable the boy is when he does the handsigns for "Twinkle, Twinkle?"). And because we can't just go healthy all the time I even got this book on pies too.

I've written down the ingredients list for this granola, these spring rolls (it's spring!), these peanut butter balls (let's help out those lunches a bit, eh?) and some of this crostini. I suppose I'll just adapt as I go so everyone can eat everything... Other suggestions? Like I said, it's bad around here. Today's big goal is a super-duper grocery shopping bonanza (sometimes I say stuff like that to make it sound like what it's most definitely not: exciting + fun!).

I have help with my ongoing craft tidy, which can be hilarious fun. I really do love that point of total disaster as you're redoing things, one step before the panic and two steps before it's all so much better. With the boy's hands in everything we hit the disaster point a bit earlier. He's so good now about taking things places. He'll bring all of the ribbons to the front door, for example, ribbon by ribbon. This is serious business.