Extravaganza Guest Blogger:: Deirdre Smith

Keeping your child occupied in the kitchen!

While you are trying to pull together a meal for your family at the end of a long day, do you have young child or children clinging to your leg? Is that child or children chanting, “Eat time! Eat time!” I have such a child at my house. A solution I have found that keeps my two year old JDaniel entertained is to give him his own cooking project. He is given a plastic tub or stew pot with about two inches of water with a dash of liquid dish soap. When he starts stirring, whisking, and cooking in the water bubbles form and that is fun the fun really starts to boil.

JDaniel has a drawer in the kitchen where I keep his cooking tools. He is able to help himself to the tools he would like to cook with each night. I have displayed JDaniel’s tool drawer below. You could use whatever you like. His drawer has some cookie cutters, a spoon, measuring cups and spoons, a nose aspirator (It makes great bubbles.), a whisk, and salad claws.

This activity is also a great way to have your child clean their hands. We pull out this activity out after we paint. It cleans the paint right off.

Deirdre Smith is JDaniel4's Mom, the forty five year old mom of a two year old son named Joseph Daniel the fourth. After teaching for twenty years, she met and married Joseph Daniel the third and moved from Northern Virginia to a suburb of Greenville, South Carolina. Last summer she decide to take what had been a blog that would have an few chatty posts about learning to be a mom posted on it every now and see what would happen with more time and focus.