Our sweet Leah

Leah has a new hobby. The other day, I came down from quiet/nap/feeding Hannah time, and Leah surprised me by having made dinner. She was positively beaming as I came over to see what she had made. She called it pizza, and it was a tortilla with salsa, cheese and walnuts (since we didn't have any pepperoni). She also put out some pineapple and cherries in case we wanted to add that to the top. She made one for me, one for her and Bekah to share, and one for Frank - without the cheese. What a sweet surprise. We praised and adored her, and choked down the concoction, and she was thrilled. She said that she felt like she was serving me by making dinner, and it made her feel so good. How do you argue with that?

So the next day, she was beaming again when I came down at the same time. This time, there were tortillas, craisins, celery and cheese. Since Frank can't eat the cheese, he got cracker crumbs. I neglected to take a "before" picture, but here's the "after" of Frank's plate. That night there was a dessert of hoagie buns topped with cottage cheese and marshmallows (more craisins in the place of the cottage cheese for Frank).

The next day, after much praise and thanks and beaming again, she informed us that she'd be making dinner again that night. I suggested that she could help me, or that I would at least supervise, and she was not happy with those options. She loved the service aspect of the surprise. But I convinced her that she needed a little supervision this time, so she would wait till after I fed Hannah. Well, I came down to a surprise of a salad topped with LOTS of walnuts and craisins. She did allow Frank to barbeque some chicken as a "side" for her salad.

Two days later, here's the surprise I came down to:

Ingredients: tortilla (that package is almost gone...), crushed up Cheez-its, pieces of hoagie bun and chicken flavored TVP (textured vegetable protein - think Bac-O's. It's a food storage thing a friend of mine shared with me because I was interested in how it tasted.) It was for the family, but, as you see from the tag, "Not Dad" because of the cheese. Dad had a late meeting that night anyway, so she made him a hot dog when he got home. Not cooked...

Oh, and another salad. Quite good actually.

And yesterday, yet another surprise. We had painted some easter eggs on Monday, and I, trying to capitalize on the cooking fervor, taught the girls how to make egg salad sandwiches on Tuesday. We included some paprika. So, Leah felt a certain level of comfortability with spices, having thoroughly loved the egg salad we made together. Enter paprika and red pepper into our surprise last night...

Leah was NOT happy with this dinner. What? Spicy? Hmmm. Lesson learned. We put a positive spin on the whole thing by telling her that even Rachel Ray probably isn't happy with every recipe she tries to make up. She may let me supervise her from now on...