Orangette Makes REALLY Good Banana Bread

I've been feeling a little lonely lately. The girls have hit a sweet spot in their ages and temperaments, in which every day together is like a playdate. They start in the morning, directly after breakfast, engaging together in one imaginative game after another, leaving a wake of unholy mess behind them, and they continue thus for the entire day. Dress-up moves to dinosaurs moves to stuffed animals moves to hanging out with the tadpoles and moves from there to something else. Heck, they even fix their own lunches--peanut butter sandwiches, YoBaby yogurt, and carrots. I don't eat that well.

I'm very lucky, obviously. I spend the entire day in my own business, now, writing and crafting and making lesson plans, etc. Except that when I'm not fixing lunch for the kidlets, I forget to eat, and when neither kid comes to me bored and they both forget to fight, I forget to suggest taking a trip anywhere, and when neither kid needs a book read or a board game partner I forget to look up from what I'm doing for six hours and then I tend to come to myself at 3:30 pm each day, unshowered and unfed and with a headache and staring at that unholy mess. Yikes.

I would never dare take the children from their happily engaged play to drag them to whatever activities I'd tentatively planned for them, but I have been working, the past couple of days, to regulate my own schedule in a more healthy way without the moods of my girls directing me from my own work to book reading to house cleaning to my own work to lunch making to game playing.

It's funny, but the girls can run by while I'm mopping or blogging or sewing and completely ignore me, but when I'm getting ready to bake, there they are, step stools and ponytail rings at hand, and suddenly I'm the most popular girl in the house again. And that is maybe why I've made this banana bread recipe, adapted from A Homemade Life, twice in the past three days. Or it could also be because it's delicious, and it looks just as good:
A Homemade Life is the book written from the Orangette blog, and the banana bread recipe from the book is a modified version of this banana bread recipe--my favorite improvement, I think, is Orangettte's use of whole milk yogurt instead of milk, or her decision to up the banana count and down the butter amount.

So I actually put in the correct amount of butter and sugar in this recipe, but I used whole wheat flour and dumped in blueberries, slivered almonds, carob chips, and chopped candied ginger.

So freakin' good. And good with my coffee and newspaper again this morning, because if nobody's going to play with you, you might as spoil yourself a little.

And thus we bring ourselves to 9:00 am. The girls are in the other room, talking animatedly over a shared carton of strawberry yogurt. I plan to clean the house, do some laundry, request some books from the library, and make record bowls, pinback buttons, and crayon rolls for my farmer's market craft fair tomorrow--come by if you're local, cause my booth is looking pretty fly these days.

I will also, and don't let me forget, feed myself, take a shower, speak to other adults, and leave my property today. Probably.