O Edamame!

This past weekend we went out to the local hibachi grill restaurant with our friends to celebrate a birthday and have a farewell dinner. Yng Yng's parents have been visiting from Malaysia for the past several months, and they returned home this week. The are very beautiful people, and it was so nice to visit with them several times over the course of their visit. So here we were at the Shogun restaurant. We were all seated around the hibachi grill. Analese and Anita were seated way across from us, and they were in their own little world. We were all enjoying an edamame appetizer. Yng Yng took a few pods over to Anita and Analese. Imagine my surprise when Analese kept coming back for more! She came back multiple times asking for more of the "beans." I was so pleased that she seemed to be so enjoying a green vegetable. She seems to be a bit anti-green veggie lately. Fast forward to Monday when we were grocery shopping. I found a bag of frozen edamame that you steam in the bag in the microwave. I threw it right into my cart, intending to serve it to Analese before she forgot about her great edamame experience in the restaurant. Fast forward to dinner tonight. I decided to serve the edamame as a side dish. I got Analese's plate all ready for her, and I filled half of her plate with edamame pods. I gave her a bowl for discarding the empty pods. She was so excited to have the edamame on her plate, and she was excited about the bowl. She got right to work squeezing the beans out of the pod. However, instead of squeezing the beans into her mouth (which is how one typically eats edamame), she was squeezing them into the bowl. I reminded her that the bowl was for the purpose of discarding the empty pods. "Oh no, mommy. I want to do it this way." OK. Whatevah. Anyway, she was having so much fun (she even SAID that she was having fun) squeezing the beans out of the pods. She ended up with a good sized serving of shelled edamame. So I suggested that she eat them. "I don't want them, mommy." WHAT??? I guess if I had been paying attention to her at the restaurant, then I may have realized that she was not actually eating the edamame, she was just shelling them for grins and giggles. Of course, little Anita was probably actually eating hers, because she is just healthy that way. So, back to tonight's dinner. I said, "Analese, you have to eat SOME of that edamame." "OK mommy, I will eat 2." Me: "No, how about 10." So I counted out 10 of the beans, and removed the other beans. About 45 minutes later, those 10 beans had made it into her tummy. She did not balk at eating them. She was just separating them into smaller piles and doing simple addition. "Look Mommy! 2+3=5! 6+2=8!"