Every once in a while the youngest in our family goes through a phase of getting up at 5am. She'll set her alarm clock, she is not a snooze button girl. She rises promptly and greets her day full of energy. Today she took care of her pets, made her bed, took a shower (as I lay in bed listening to the shower water turn on and off, determining whether she is lathering or rinsing, her latest effort in conservation). At this point I figure I should get up as well, and put a little effort into my day. It's about 5:30...

By 6am she had taken the dog out, checked and harvested the days take from the garden, and set about filling up many, many little jars with fresh flowers. It's a little thing of hers that I'm rather fond of.

Somewhere in the midst of her whirlwind, I did manage to squeak out a batch of our favorite blueberry muffins, but that's about it. Well, I did put together Adam's lunch, we sat down together for a weekday breakfast (which doesn't happen too often), then sent him on his way for the day. As I write this there has been spritzing of the bathroom counters upstairs, and vacuuming. Lot's and lot's of vacuuming. Now she is right next to me vacuuming... I'm not feeling right about this... blogging while my child vacuums under my feet... hmmm. I better run, but let me leave you with two recipes.

1. I made a great little fruit dip for Adam's lunch today, to go with apple and pear slices. Yes, he's 36, but what can I say, we're dippy kind of people. It's simple. Mix 1 cup vanilla yogurt with 3 TBS. orange marmelade and 1 TBS. poppy seeds. I figured with school lunches on the horizon for many of us you might like to try it, it's excellent!
2. The recipe for blueberry muffins. Click on the photo to enlarge, hopefully you can read it. This recipe was used at my father-in-law's deli years ago. It's where Adam and I met, I used to bake these every day at 5am. Today I didn't use any raspberries, just blueberries, I adjusted the amount. This makes a huge pan of very large muffins. I suggest cutting the recipe in half, you aren't trying to impress the customers with your super-sized everything... this paper is the original recipe from the deli, can you tell? I really should re-type this soon.

There are a few changes I make, I don't use white sugar but a mix of sucanat and evaporated cane juice (which is super close to being white sugar, hence the sucanat), I also make my own "bisquick", there are recipes all over the internet.

:::UPDATED::: I just read this recipe... in case you can't tell, the temp for the oven is 375 degrees. If you do go ahead and half the recipe, making more normal sized muffins, you only need to cook then for about 25 minutes. Today I cooked them at 400 for 20 minutes, I'm a flexible baker. ;)

Oh, one more thing for those of you who have made it this far... with school lunch making coming up, do you have any great ideas? I'd love to do a lunch box post in the next week or so and would love your ideas/recipes to contribute. Of course I will link to you, and I think we would all benefit, even when we were homeschooling there were so many days when we would pack lunch to meet with friends, go apple picking, swimming, etc. Feel free to leave ideas in the comments. Thank you!