Lift Up Your Hearts!

Breakfast
An international child, Joseph might start his day with leftover pizza, or rice, or bread and peanut butter, or a tortilla with "spices" (more on that later).  But for the most part his breakfast is "no no bissi" a.k.a. yoghurt and muesli.  Unsweetened muesli and plain yoghurt—and he loves it.  His drink for all meals is water.  He feeds himself with a spoon quite competently, although as you can imagine some cleanup is required.

For breakfast I might have yoghurt and muesli, or cooked oatmeal, or good Swiss bread, or yummy, fresh Swiss eggs (with golden yolks).

Dinner
The noontime meal is the primary one here, because Daddy comes home from work to join us.  To the Swiss, the idea of a cold lunch is strange. I must say that cooking makes the morning seem short, but it's very nice to have an easy meal in the evening.

We've been eating very well.  Janet is a good cook, and has been experimenting with new meals that supposedly freeze well, doubling them to have a supply for ATB (after the baby is born).  The salutary habit of American churches of supplying families with post-childbirth meals seems to be unknown here.  We've had meatloaf, orange chicken, curried shrimp and rice, pizza, fondue, raclette, sausage dishes, and other good things I can't list because I can't remember, and only this week's menu is post on the refrigerator door.  :)

Joseph eats pretty much whatever the rest of us are having, feeding himself competently with some combination of fork and fingers.  The exception is sweets, which are mostly excluded from his diet, just as coffee, tea, beer, and wine are.  He is, however, beginning to realize that the adult "crackers" (cookies) taste better than his....

Supper
This is a lighter meal, often leftovers, or bread and cheese.  The Swiss do eat sandwiches, but it doesn't seem very common.  Again, Joseph eats bits and pieces of whatever the adults have.

Snacks
In Switzerland, it seems expected that children will eat more often than at mealtimes.  "znüüni" (at 9 a.m.) and "zvieri" (at 4 p.m.) are planned snacks, although Joseph gets his at varying times depending on our schedule.  He might have banana and peanut butter, or cheese, or bread, or "no no bissi," or almost anything else that is reasonably healthy.  One of his favorite snacks is "ti" with "pie-h'n" (spices)—tortilla sprinkled with something from the spice rack, from garlic powder to cinnamon.  Joseph would put spices on almost everything if allowed.  (Peanut butter toast with cinnamon, anyone?)  The only time he objected was when I gave him some of my pizza, which I had sprinkled with "pie-h'n" of my own—red pepper flakes.

Drinks
Joseph's drink at all meals, and in between, is water.  Occasionally he will have a small cup of milk, and once, when we squeezed some blood oranges, he had a few sips of the juice.  The fresh-squeezed juice was a real treat, especially for Janet and me, because no Floridian can be really happy with less than fresh-squeezed juice.  For breakfast, we usually drink "orange juice-like liquid" (orange juice from concentrate) from the store, as not-from-concentrate juice here isn't even as good as it is in the U.S., and it's expensive.

Unfortunately, I'm here in the wrong season to get the delicious unpasteurized cider from the farm down the road.  (The farmer expressed astonishment that cider must be pasteurized in the U.S.)

Janet's been drinking boring, store-bought milk since getting close to her due date, but the other day we walked to the diary farm and bought a liter of raw milk.  For dinner and supper we mostly drink water, but lately I've been indulging in the milk.  Unpasteurized milk really is a different sort of beast.  Normally I drink only skim milk, and can't abide even 1%, let alone whole milk.  But in its natural state, whole milk is delicious.

That's about it for this edition of Life with Joseph.  It's taken me three days to get this far, and those-who-can't-be-here are anxious for news.  Of course, the news they're most anxious for is a birth announcement, but I give what I can....