Soup for Sick People

Jeez, I feel like all I ever talk about now is sleep deprivation and head colds, but that's pretty much been our life since Thanksgiving. But I think today I am cured.  Sleep, massive doses of vitamin C and honey and a Neti pot. I held off on that last one, but it's really not so bad and luckily the MM thought the sight of salt water pouring out one of my nostrils into the kitchen sink was way cool, not gross.  Love that man. Anyhoodle. Soup.

Here is the great thing about this soup. 1) You need to eat warm, brothy chicken soup when you're sick but who has the energy to cook when you're sick, EXCEPT 2) this soup is all chop and dump.  I think it's the most perfect chop and dump recipe I've ever found.  You can find the recipe on Epicurious here, but literally this is all you do:

Chop up 1 onion, 3 carrots, 3 celery ribs and dump them in a big pot with 1/3 cup packed Italian parseley, 1 cup of long grain brown rice and 3 tsp. salt and a 3 or 4lb chicken.  Cover it all with 3 quarts of water, bring to a boil and then simmer, covered for 1 hour.  Pull out the chicken, let it cool off, then pull off the skin and shred all the meat.  Dump (!) the chicken back in the soup and season with salt and pepper.  Boom.  You can seriously handle this, even while sick.  How exciting is that?
Head colds put a damper on taking adorable photos of one's offspring, but here's Ford at 20 weeks last weekend all excited about his exersaucer.

We were steeling ourselves for a long, long week of transitioning Ford to sleeping in his crib in his own room, but it's gone off without a hitch.  What a relief to find that he was as ready for a quiet, uninterrupted night of sleep as we were! He's been a happy, expressive little guy all week as a result. Getting up in the night to go in there and nurse him is an adjustment, but he eats better that way and I don't drift off, only to find him still in the bed 2 hours later and wonder why I have a pinched neck from holding my arm in some crazy position to keep from rolling towards him.  Win-win.  Until he cuts a tooth.