Just Not In The Kitchen, Dear
Posted By jayna on December 14, 2011
I can’t be the only one out there that doesn’t enjoy cooking with their kids, right? Right??
For some hare-brained reason, I thought it would be a good idea to follow last year’s newly instituted tradition and make millions of cookies and pirogi for Christmas. The logic and reason part of my brain didn’t seem to be firing as I purchased all the ingredients, pulled all the recipes and stacked up the cookie sheets. Last year I was completely exhausted and vowed to never try and get everything done in such a small chunk of time again. And yet, this year, I found myself with only a 48 hour window to squeeze in all of the mixing and rolling and cutting and baking and boiling and decorating. All along with, you know, every other thing that has to be squeezed in on regular weekdays.
Even more crazy of a thought? I had visions of spending some quality time in the kitchen with the girls, as they helped me with our giant list of cookies.
I have no idea what I was thinking.
For starters, I am a serious clean freak. Getting the kitchen dirty as flour spills and crumbs fall drives me absolutely nuts. Add in the fact that we have tile counters and slate tile floors that are both begging for sticky things to be ground into, and I start just permanently keeping a wipe in my hand for every single grain of sugar that goes astray. Add a preschooler and a toddler into that mix – along with a newborn that insists on being held - and you have nothing but a recipe for me wanting to throw an entire sheet of cookies out the back door in frustration.
I want to like cooking with my girls, I really do. E is always begging to make something in the kitchen with me, and they both fight for the stool to watch everything I do. I see other people teaching their kids to cook at young ages and am in awe. I cannot for the life of me let go enough to watch half the flour not make it into the mixer. Or the ball of cookie dough become a hundred different shapes before crumbling to the floor. I hear myself becoming a broken record of “watch out, that’s hot!” and “pay attention, that’s going to fall off the counter!” and “stop touching that, it’s already done!”
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that one of my “cooks” is very, very two at the moment. Everything is her way or the highway, including cookie decorating. The standoff we had over an entire tub of sprinkles can attest to that. Or, perhaps it is that the other “cook” is oblivious to most everything around her a good 90% of the time. I found myself turning back around to see her absentmindedly squashing a stack of gingerbread men or teetering a full cooling rack over the counter edge as she pushed it with her elbow. We lost an entire sheet of candy cane cookies to an ill-timed wobble in her chair.
Or, most of all, perhaps it is all me. Me, vowing to spend more time just being with my kids and yet being completely unable to let go enough to look past the fact that they really are just kids. They aren’t going to be able to be in a kitchen, involved in the cooking process, and not make a mess. Messes are just what kids do. Slowly but surely, they’ll grow out of these years where it is normal to have crumbs around their mouths and stains down their shirts. Eventually I’ll be able to enjoy having them in the kitchen so much that I will teach them enough to make entire meals on their own.
For now though? I am just going to completely admit that, thanks to my serious need for clean, I absolutely cannot stand cooking with my kids. I cannot squeeze 14 dozen cookies and 3 dozen pirogi into 48 hours with two messy helpers and not lose my mind. Can. Not. Do. It. Someday, we’ll have a wonderful time in the kitchen together – as I put them on a pirogi assembly line! – but that time is definitely not now.
And, honestly? I think they’re totally okay with all this, as long as they get to eat the cookies.
(last sheet of cookies about to go in the oven at way-too-late-o’clock last night. baby totally enthralled with our snowflakes up there. thank goodness.)
I totally hear you. I always think cooking with kids is going to be fun. And I’m proven wrong over and over.