Babies cry, and you feel sorry for them and cuddle them and walk the floor with them. You give them milk and swaddle them up tight. You have patience with them, because they are new and little and helpless.

Toddlers also cry. But they don’t only cry. They also whine and hang on your skirts. You give them the snack they liked yesterday, and they throw it on the floor and pout. They steal food off your plate, even though they were too full to eat any more when they were in their highchair. They steal pacifiers from each other so fast that you really don’t know who had it first, and they throw temper tantrums when you don’t let them have cellphones, or knives. You try to be patient, but the patience that once came so naturally now frays around the edges a bit.

Toddlers gain dexterity and learn to do all kinds of things with their little hands–awkwardly wield a spoon, whack sister over the head with a spoon, scribble with a colored pencil, and stick the tip of the colored pencil between teeth and bite it off to see just what green tastes like. Toddlers love to pry off outlet covers with little fingers and then try to stick them back on again, completely oblivious to the fact that those outlet covers were supposed to keep little fingers like theirs away from the outlet.

They also learn to say, “Dat-do (Thank-you),” in charming tones when they get what they want. They learn to find a pacifier and stuff it in the mouth of a suffering brother or sister.

Yesterday, Teddy hugged his daddy’s Bible tight and said, “Bible,” and I didn’t even know he knew what that was.

“Where is Ellie?” I asked, as I stuffed him in his highchair, also yesterday.

“Eyyie!” he called out, anxious to get on with the business of praying and eating.

My twin toddlers had their first experience with corn on the cob this week, and they held it up to their mouths and chewed off the kernels, like they had done it many times before. Ellie finished hers first and held out the nearly empty cob to me and begged for more.

Can anything be more endearing than a toddler? But can anything be more exasperating?

I am challenged every day by my two tiny people, and the problems that to them seem so big. They fight over toys, but the toys change hands so many times that I get confused. One of them suddenly bursts into tears, and I come running, wondering what the other twin did, but unable to definitively say that I see teeth marks. I wonder if disciplining is the answer to tired tantrums, or if, instead, I should be wracking my brain for a way to get them to sleep better.

And amidst all of this, I try to come up with something for them to eat a minimum of four times a day. The requirements for toddler food sometimes become mountainous in my mind: it needs to be not only nutritious, but also easy (please), and delicious (by a one-year-old’s standards). We have sat sadly in front of seven macaronis for minutes on end. It is not an experience I want to repeat at every meal.

I am grateful that as picky as toddlers can be, they do not usually complain about repetition. Here are five of our favorites. (For now, anyway.)

Five Of My Twin Toddlers’ Favorites

(For other moms who also run out of ideas)

Baby pancakes.

Baby pancakes are what I call them–I don’t actually know if that’s their official name or not. This recipe can be found various places on the internet, and I understand why. Both my toddlers love them, and Teddy can jam four down his gullet in the space of about as many minutes. I probably make them for breakfast half the mornings of the week. They take so little effort that even I, who am NOT a morning person, can tackle the task of making them before 8 a.m.

Mash: One banana. Add: One egg. 2 tablespoons flour. (I usually use whole wheat.) Stir until thoroughly combined. I scoop them onto my hot and greased skillet with a cookie scoop to make little pancakes easy for little toddler hands to grasp.

DIY popsicles.

I saw a twin strawberry popsicle mold for $3 in the deals section at Target, and I bought it for obvious reasons. I have no problem with occasionally giving my twins popsicles from a store, and I grew up eating those multicolored ice-pops in plastic tubes on summer days, but I don’t necessarily want that to be a normal snack for them–it falls somewhere short of what I think of as “nourishing”. Nor do I want to spend a long time in the kitchen mixing up a fancy sugar-free popsicle recipe from the internet. So my go-tos are applesauce and yogurt and fruit–pretty much any combination you want. Sometimes I freeze plain applesauce in the strawberry molds. One time I mashed blueberries into unflavored yogurt and added a little honey. That one was a big hit. Unsweetened applesauce and plain yogurt mixed together works great, or, if you have vanilla yogurt you can even layer it. My toddlers don’t even know the difference, I don’t think, between frozen applesauce and a store-bought popsicle. If you don’t have popsicle molds, a small cup with a baby spoon frozen in the middle can also work.

Freeze plain applesauce. Or go half yogurt, half applesauce. Or mix a handful of mashed blueberries into plain yogurt and sweeten with a little honey.

Spaghetti.

We had spaghetti for supper tonight, and I was reminded again that all of the picky toddlers that have lived under my roof love spaghetti. With most foods, the twins would pick out the ground meat and leave it on the side of their tray or avoid those little pieces of tomato. Not so with spaghetti.

I browned three pounds of ground meat today and put two in the freezer. That way we can have spaghetti soon again without undo effort on my part.

My ratios: One pound ground meat, one pint pizza sauce, one package spaghetti, and water as needed.

Crackers and Peanut-butter.

For a long time, I almost exclusively stuck to whole wheat crackers and all-natural peanut-butter spread. However, lately I have become somewhat less of a stickler about the whole-wheat thing and have even stooped to sometimes giving them cinnamon-sugar graham crackers. You see, Ben and I also sometimes crave cinnamon-sugar graham crackers with peanut-butter…

Fruit, fruit, fruit, and sometimes veggies too.

If given the chance, we would probably eat blueberries, and blueberries exclusively, with some milk on the side. We scarf down bananas, we gulp up grapes as fast as mom can cut them up, and today, for a snack, we ate three little plastic dishes of canned peaches between us. Except for the plastic dishes. Mom threw them in the trash. We love fruit.

We will also happily eat beans, peas, and corn if there isn’t any fruit available. But please don’t even try to sneak spinach into our eggs, or avocados into our mac-n-cheese!

P.S. Do you know what two of my favorites are? The two little toddlers that live in my house–exasperating, endearing, and all!