Baking with the Big Girl

For the past three Thursday nights Aaron has gone to play soccer with a friend in the evenings. Secretly (or okay, not so secretly anymore), I love this time. I get Baby Ister down for bed and then Keira and I scramble into the kitchen to make a huge baking mess. Tonight we conquered three recipes (2 new, 1 tried and true). We made kale brownies (sounds weird but Y-U-M), peanut butter balls (wasn't impressed with this particular recipe), and mocha chocolate bites. All were from a website I've been using a lot lately called chocolatecoveredkatie.com. She has oodles of healthy dessert recipes, and I have loved/tweaked many of them. Anyway, more on the healthy desserts, etc in blogs to come, but tonight I just want to remember our baking night...

For starters, I don't get a ton of one-on-one time with Keira. You'd be surprised by that since I stay home all day with her, but there's just very little time (if at all) in a day that it's just one of the girls awake. So, I cherish my one on one time with each of them when I can get it. She has shown an interest in baking, which makes her baking mama happy. She helps me collect all the ingredients and "reads" the recipe for me. She pours (i.e. dumps/spills) the ingredients in the bowl for me. She tests ingredients while we are baking. Tonight as I turned my back to get something else, she decided to add "just a lil extra salt, mommy, just a littttttttlllle extra". Thankfully it all landed in one spot that could easily be scooped up with by a spoon! She loves this time and so do I. :)

Tonight she got completely covered in chocolate, and as I looked at the clock realizing it was nearing 9 (whoops) and she was a mess, the kitchen was a mess and I hadn't showered yet today I realized the easiest solution was to stick her in the shower with me. This is one of those ah-ha, DUH parenting things that I don't know WHY I haven't done til now, but I guess it's mostly because my girl loves her baths so much. Anyway, all is clean, the shower was "SOOOO cool Mommy!! lots of water splashing EV-ER-RE where" and the little girl is tucked in bed. When we did our book, and prayer and song tonight before I stuck her into bed, she took my face in her little hands, and said, "Thank you Mommy." Melt my heart. Thank YOU Keira for such a fun night, and thank you Lord for blessing me with this beautiful girl.