My niece trying to play with her (still-in-progress) cousin

My husband and I babysat our niece and nephew on Monday night. Our niece found some rocketship toys and she was calling them "baby rockets" and came over and was trying to "play with the baby" with the rockets.

I had my purse next to me on the couch with my camera so I started shooting what she was doing. My favorite is that In the end she sees the camera and says "cheese!"

It's interesting to me that our niece (who will be 2 next month) is super interested in my growing tummy and likes to talk to the baby and pat my belly to say hi to the baby. I'm not sure if she really understands what's going on but she talks about it a lot and likes to talk to and pat my tummy. Her older brother (almost 4), on the other hand really doesn't get it. Which is interesting to me because have been around for the growing of his little sister...you'd think the whole baby thing would make more sense to him. *shrug* Whatev. It may just be a "different kids, different personalities, different interests" thing. I'm sure he will care more once we can dress the baby up like Batman. :-D

Mama Mia!

Coming home from running errands today I began to ponder dinner. I had meant to buy turkey meatballs at the store but, alas, this store did not carry them. What to make for dinner then?

So far this week we had sushi, tuna casserole (not the nasty, runny tuna wiggle kind. This is amazing tuna casserole) and fajitas. I was feeling a bit like getting back to my [Italian] roots. I didn't want to make a plain old boring meat sauce and thought I'd do meatballs myself. I pulled out my family's top secret meatball recipe and got to work.

At first I thought the ingredients were a little odd. The recipe includes some things that would have never occurred to me to put in meatballs and leaves out some things I would think were "obvious." I resisted the urge to mess with it. I also resisted the urge to use my fancy Pampered Chef tools to make it faster and easier. I wanted to do it the old school way.

Then something magical happened. Standing barefoot in my quiet kitchen rolling meatballs by hand I felt this strange connection to my family thousands of miles and/or generations away. This is how my sister, mom, grandmother and great-grandmother (and who knows how much further back) all make these meatballs. It was almost like they were all there with me. I also felt very, very Italian (I mean, I am Italian....but I just felt like Super Italian). This is the first time this has ever happened to me and it was really special.

This also gave me an insight into the line of thinking some knitters have: that you do things to old school way, because that's how it's been done for thousands of years. Previous to this experience, this thought process seemed very, well, odd. But for the first time I understood. I still don't feel that way about knitting -- as far as I can tell, my family doesn't have much of a knitting legacy to pass down and that's probably why. But meatballs, stuffing and lasagna? You do it the old school way....because that's just how you do it.