Little Miss' great love these days is helping in the kitchen. Whenever I walk towards the kitchen she yells, "Alp! Alp!" while running towards the kitchen to quickly grab a chair and pull it up to the counter. It's really cute, but I have difficulty working sometimes in an already small kitchen and this further complicates things. Sometimes it's easy for me to find things to have her help with, and sometimes I just need to get a scary knife out to chop up some vegetables quickly to go on the hot stove. I asked my mama friends what they would do in my situation. They suggested buying some wooden food for her kitchen that she could practice cutting with a knife. Done.
As a teacher I should've seen this coming, but since it wasn't a truly authentic task, the novelty soon wore off and she was back in the kitchen demanding to 'alp.' In response, I'm trying to ingest an extra large helping of patience each day and have her help me with as much as she safely can.
As an occasional treat, she gets to 'steer' the cart at the grocery store.
I also have her help me with smaller tasks, like cutting the tops off her strawberries for lunch when packing for school in the mornings.
She absolutely loves it and I've found some things that she enjoys doing (strawberries, peeling garlic and onions, stirring ingredients together) that are actually helpful. I'm sure the opportunities were there, but I don't remember helping much when I was a kid and cooking as an adult carried a steep learning curve. Hopefully involving her in the kitchen so much now will yield some positive results for her in the future. In the meantime, I just try to be patient every time things get spilled all over the floor or she refuses to eat what she just wanted to help me make. Any extra patience anyone else has is welcome over here!
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