Dumplins

When J started this current rotation, otherwise known as ICU, otherwise known as H-E-Double Hockeystix, his mom decided to come out for a week to make the descent into the underworld more bearable.  When she came, I was feeling much, much less sick than I had been.  Which is awesome! Because MIL is a Cook.  With a capital C.
What did we do all week, you ask?  We went shopping!  Grocery shopping.  And we cooked. And cooked. And baked.  And cooked.  At one point she had me smashing dead chickens with a mallet. 
Yeah.  She's that good. 
And this is also true: when MIL came I had struggled to gain just 2 pounds over the entire course of my pregnancy.  During the week she was with us, I gained 5 pounds.  In one week! Yeah.  That good.
I have a lot of cute pictures of her with Little One from her visit here, but these are my favorites.  Because MIL is not just a person of various sorts who cooks.  She is a Cook.  She's amazing at it, in part because she puts a lot of love into her cooking. She takes painstaking efforts with details that most rush through, skip, or buy pre-packaged.  Cooking is how she takes care of her family.
I loved these particular moments in the kitchen, because in these photos MIL is teaching Little One to make Her great-grandmother's recipe for homemade chicken and dumplings.  Mixing up the dough, rolling it out and shaping it, stirring the pot...a tradition passed down.  There are a lot of things I hope Little One learned from cooking with Gramma.   How to start at the beginning, do things right, and see them through.  How sometimes the simplest things are the best.  How real is always better than manufactured facsimile.  And how to make something, truly delicious.  So that I don't have to.