Our Week in the Bathroom and Kitchen

We have done a lot of two things this week... potty training and cooking. Not things you would normally associate together, but it is what it is. :) For the past few weeks we have been doing a sticker chart with Eli in the bathroom. He was still wearing diapers, but we would give him a sticker if he peed in the potty and also a cookie if his diaper was dry when he went.

We decided that we needed to just jump in at some point to see if he was really ready to potty train. So, on Monday I took him to buy some big boy undies and he has been wearing them mostly during the day since. He is having a few accidents each day (only two today!), but he does seem to be slowly catching on, (I am mostly telling him when to go at this point) so we are going to stick with it for now. I have a low threshold currently for when he gets rewarded because I want to keep him interested. I am very ready to be changing diapers on ONE hiney instead of two. We are leaving for Africa in a little over five months and it would be a huge help to have Eli toilet trained by then.

We have had several people over for dinner since we have been here in Morgantown. We have mostly invited people out of Marc's tropical medicine class that we wanted to get to know a little bit better. Many of the people taking this class are doing or will be doing medical mission work so it is neat to see all the places many of these families are going. There are also a few nurses who work for MSF (like Doctors without Borders, a secular humanitarian aid group) who are from Canada and Switzerland. It was so much fun getting to know them this week. One of the many interesting things I learned is that Canada offers a 12 month paid maternity leave (which can even be split up between the husband and wife if they want so both parents can stay home with their baby until six months!) and Switzerland offers six months. What?!? They were shocked to find out that working moms here only have a doctor excused leave for 6-8 weeks depending on the type of delivery. It is so fun getting to know people of different walks of life, and I always love an excuse to spend some time in the kitchen preparing a meal. :)

I haven't put up any recipes lately so I thought I would throw in a dessert recipe today. I found this on a blog a few weeks ago and decided to put it to the test this week. I am usually a little hesitant to try new recipes on guests, but I figured it would be pretty hard to mess up fruit in a pie crust. This was an EASY recipe. I really don't think you could mess this one up. The most time consuming part was peeling and slicing the peaches. I made it two nights in a row and it was devoured on both occassions. If the peaches where you live are as good as they are here right now then try this recipe!

Blueberry Peach Galette
Serves 4-6

1 pie crust rolled to 12 inches
3 cups fresh (or frozen) peach slices
1/2 cup fresh blueberries
1/8 cup of sugar
1 Tbs. apricot preserves

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Mix the peaches, blueberries, and sugar in a bowl and set aside. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and roll out the pie crust. Place the fruit mixture in the center leaving a 3 inch border. Bring up the sides of the pie crust and pinch to seal in several places. Warm the preserves for a few seconds in the microwave. Brush the pie crust and the top of the fruit filling with the preserves. Bake at 425 degrees for 10 minutes and then turn down the oven to 350 and bake for an additional 20 minutes. You will probably either have juice run out underneath the crust onto the paper or it will pool a little in the center but it still tastes great either way. You could probably mix in some flour or corn starch to your fruit mixture to help thicken the juice some. I think it all depends on how much water is in your fresh fruit. I served this with a scoop of ice cream. You can go to this blog post if you like step-by-step instructions.