I didn’t want to have to be the one to tell you this, but the parenting advice books and websites all lie. To be fair, they tend to run the spectrum from vague generalities to downright lies. Traditionally, parents are supposed to find this out for themselves the hard way. You are supposed to find yourself sprawled out on the floor outside your baby’s bedroom at 3:30am, tears streaked down your face, the sound of a disconsolate infant wailing in the background, while you whip that mother effing sleep training book against the far wall. That’s the way it’s done.
Lucky you for you, though, I am here to help. I can’t do anything about the baby sleep issue, silly; you just have to figure that one out for yourself. But I can tell you that all those articles and blogs and helpful friends who counsel you to “just include your children in the kitchen” can go to hell.
Cooking or baking can be okay as an activity in and of itself. Like, if you want to put aside a three-hour block of time to make 20-minute muffins with your three-year-old, that can be a fine way to kill an afternoon. I mean, it sure as hell beats making crafts or getting down on the ground and actually playing with them in my books.
But if you actually, say, just want to make lunch? “Omigod,” you’ll be thinking, “Can you please just go and sprinkle playdoh all over the living room carpet or take a bingo dabber to the wall or unravel a roll of toilet paper? Can you please just do something that will take less time and energy to deal with than this?”
I tell you this because I, too, listened to those so-called experts. Spurred on by my four-year-old daughter’s love for her play kitchen and an increasingly picky appetite, I encouraged her to help me. We went shopping together and painstakingly picked out ingredients. We wore aprons and I talked her through every step. She was in charge of putting vegetable peelings into the organic waste and chopped up veggies into the pot. She sprinkled in seasonings. She watched meal after meal bubble away on the stove. She oohed and ahhed at the final product. She sat down and, as often as not, declared it yucky. “I don’t like it,” she’d say. “But you helped me make it!” I’d say.
And then yesterday, I was trying to slap together some roast beef sandwiches for lunch and she pulled up her “special stool” (ie. the regular kitchen step stool) to help. Fantastic.
There were two pairs of sliced bread stacked side-by-side on a cutting board.
“Would you like mustard on your sandwich?” I asked.
“Yes, but not that SPICY mustard!”
“Okay, I have some regular yellow mustard here for you.”
I squeezed some mustard on the top slice of bread on the first stack.
“I don’t want mustard on the top of my sandwich!!”
“It’s not going to be the top, sweetheart. I’m going to use this bottom slice of bread on the top, see?”
“No, no, no, NO! NOOOOOO!!!! I won’t eat it! Never, never, never! I’m never going to eat lunch again!”
And that was just the mustard. Learn from my mistakes.