Cooking with Kids

I've been meaning to start cooking more with the kids, and Sunday afternoon we finally got to it. I was making a roasted chicken, and G first agreed to help me chop up the vegetables. Yes, that is a real knife. Bean Dip soon joined in when he saw that I was scraping carrots. He took over that job for me.

They had a lot of fun, I didn't stress too much, and there was no blood. Bean Dip has been wanting to learn about fractions, so I incorporated that into the cooking lesson. It's so much easier to understand halves, quarters, etc., when you are chopping potatoes. But by far, his favorite part was smashing the garlic.

I'm going to try to do this more, for so many reasons. It's a great way to spend time with the kids, great skills to teach them, and a good way to get them interested in the food they are eating. 

Oh, and dinner was delicious.

After a three days of cloudy weather, she was so happy to have a sunny day ...

Cliff Jumping

This morning, Baby G woke up and said her legs hurt. Turns out she was sore from playing all day yesterday. It was pretty funny, she said her legs and back hurt so much she couldn't bend over. Luckily, by the afternoon she seemed to have recovered.

Maybe it was the time change, or all the candy ingested, but she woke up Sunday morning all wound up. The activities began with me hearing her yell from the other room, "I'm Super Girl! I can fly!" Yeah, she was leaping off the couch onto the floor.

"Watch me, Mom! I'm flying!"

We went outside to play, and the "flying" continued. At the edge of our front yard is a sewer cover, and right next to it is the little dip in the yard where our yard meets the neighbor's. G was trying to figure out what she could jump off of to fly. She was pacing back and forth in the driveway, tapping her finger to her mouth, saying, "What I need is real live wings and real live pixie dust and then I could fly!" I told her she might just have to pretend to have wings ...

So all morning, and later all afternoon, this is what she ended up doing: running and jumping off the "cliff," also known as the sewer cover. At one point, she came up to Win with her bike helmet and said, "Dad, can you put this on me? I'm going to do something bad." Win asked her exactly what she was going to do, and she said, "I'm going to ride my bike over the edge of the cliff." And guess what, that's exactly what she did. At least she thought about Safety First.

And so, a new game began. Bean Dip joined in, and so did Earl and Cameron. For hours, they rode laps around the yard, taking turns riding their bikes over the edge of the cliff.

This afternoon, they were back at it again, as soon as BD got off the bus and until it got dark. And as we all headed in, they made plans to be at it again tomorrow.

And wouldn't you know it, I didn't take a single picture of the cliff jumping.