Finding his Feet

Yes, the Frog has discovered his lower appendages.  He caught sight of them woggling about, and simply had to investigate further.  In his case, further analysis of anything involves sticking it in his mouth.  With great determination, and quite a bit of red-faced huffing and stretching, he managed to grip one foot with both hands, but it wouldn't cooperate, and kept kicking away before he could get it to his mouth.  I guess the Complete Foot Investigation will have to keep.

In the last couple of days, he's also started squealing.  He starts at such a high pitch it bothers the dogs next door, and ends with a kind of creaky voice (which I figure is about as low as he can go).  And he's loud.  I wonder if this is the very beginning of experimenting with intonation - exaggerated variations in pitch and loudness as the very first deliberate imitations of the speech sounds he hears.  I wonder, indeed.

On a completely different note, after Hubs made a meal the other night, we had about a gazillion left-over egg-whites, which he was about to chuck.  I rescued them with a well-placed tupperware container, and decided to try to turn them into the only thing I could think of off the top of my head: meringue.  Okay, so not exactly healthy, but hey.  Well, the gist of a meringue seems pretty simple: beat egg whites, and keep adding sugar until the whites have about doubled in volume, and are pretty firm.  Oh, and a bit of vanilla.  I was just going to splodge them onto baking trays with a spoon, but the Frog was being such a good lad - sitting in his bouncy chair and quietly gnawing on the ear of his toy cat - that I thought I'd try piping.  I don't have an icing bag, so just improvised with a plastic bag with a corner cut off, which seemed to work as well.  The piped end results looked a little like anaemic dog turds. 

Ah well, as a new mother, I'm a natural coprophile, right?  So here's something I didn't know about meringues.  Apparently you dry them out in the oven, rather than baking them.  So, my oven's sitting on the lowest heat setting with the door open with rows of little white coils slowly desiccating inside.  Tomorrow's the test.