Pizza night

Yesterday Gabriel had been in trouble after school because he wouldn't mind me AT ALL about rest time when we got home from school. First I threatened no visit to Mamaw and Poppy's that afternoon. Then I threatened to take away TV and computer. Then cars and trucks, and finally no music or instrument playing. None of them worked. So he was pretty much stuck with reading books or playing pretend games the rest of the day.

And as these things go, it ended up being such a fun afternoon. Gabriel had received a robot from our neighbors, George and Billie, for his birthday, and he and Joel crawled around on the floor after it. We played with the dinosaurs. Gabriel was funny because at first he was having the big dinosaurs eating some of the smaller ones, and when I said something about how sad that was, he started having the big ones spit them back out.

It got to be dinner time, and Joel gets to watch a half hour of either Tellytubbies or Baby Einstein. Gabriel decided to hang out with me in the kitchen, and started out reading some books. But then I asked if he wanted to help me make dinner, and he said yes! Thursday is pizza night at our house, and last night I was making turkey sausage, mushroom and black olive with Alfredo sauce and mozzarella cheese. I chopped and grated and he help me put things on the pizza. I've read somewhere that if kids help with dinner they are much more likely to try new foods and eat them.

And it was true! He ate an entire piece, mushrooms and all. Maybe it had to do with him going through a growth spurt, because he gets really hungry and will try just about anything! But it really warmed my heart. I will not push him to help again, but I will definitely ask every once in awhile because we both had a great time. I can't say that I hope he will get in trouble again soon, but maybe he'll keep wanting to help on pizza night. IF I can tear him away from the computer games.

Oh, and notice the President placemat sitting underneath his food in the picture above? Tia Sandie and Michael brought it back from DC for him. He has now learned half (22) of our Presidents by sight. First and last names. We play the President game every night at dinner. The way he remembers them varies. There's the one with crazy hair. And one with wet hair. There's the three in the "long beard" group. There's two named Franklin and two with the last name Johnson. But the reason the game got started was because of the really bald ones, which he calls "baby head Presidents". (John Quincy Adams, Eisenhower, and Ford). This seemed totally innocent until we were on vacation eating dinner one night and Gabriel pointed to man walking by and said (loudly, of course), "Look, that man has a baby head!" Oops. We're working on reversing that mistake.