New adventures in toddler land

So it has been FOREVER since I've been on here. Lots has changed. My husband got a new job - a MUCH better job. And as a result we were able to relocate and upgrade our living arrangements. We also have just a SLIGHT bit of disposable income now that we can use for things here and there, so we've tried to focus on activities that will keep our two toddler boys occupied. B, who will be 5 in October, is very bright and catches on to things quickly, while P is all about the sports balls. We did buy them Amazon kids tablets (since they pretty much destroyed my iPad and these puppies come with a 2-year unlimited warranty - they could dump them in the toilet and Amazon would replace them completely for free!), but we clearly don't want our kids spending day in and day out on tablets. B also is already showing signs of getting easily bored. His little mind needs to be working - putting things together, taking them apart, analyzing, being creative. So this summer will be a struggle to keep him stimulated. That's where this post, and probably the new focus of this blog, comes in. 

One of B's interests is cooking. He ALWAYS wants to help me in the kitchen. His kitchen play set provides some entertainment for him, but he'd rather do the real thing. So I let him help by being in charge of kid-friendly things like cheese. We've ventured so far as to let him handle the spices, although he's been a little heavy handed with the pepper once or twice :-). So with moving 45 minutes away from where they were born, we discovered Young Chefs Academy. We enrolled B in the weekly Kinder Cooks class for kids ages 4-6. It's a parent-child class, so for a fee each week or a monthly membership, kids and their parents go class and prepare a full recipe from start to finish. The school provides all of the ingredients and tools - you just show up and take your leftovers home with you. Each month has a theme, and all the recipes for the month revolve around that theme. This is apparently one of the MOST exciting things that we could find for B to do because literally every day he will ask me if today is cooking class. I had to put a big blue circle around every Thursday and start marking the days off the calendar so he could keep track of when his next class is. We're now three weeks in and still rolling. He loves it so much that he actually cheered when I brought home a new blender and stand mixer from Target earlier this week. What 4-year-old cheers over kitchen appliances? Apparently, mine ....

Week 1 was an adventure to say the least. I had no idea what to expect as we had never been to Young Chefs Academy before. We were greeted at the door by Chef Chad. Inside the classroom there was a wall of cabinets and appliances. In the middle of the room was the teacher chef's station with a stainless steel table and racks of bowls, cooking tools and ingredients, surrounded by a semi-circle of stainless steel tables and chairs for the kids. Each child washed their hands and then put on their aprons because, man, can toddlers make a mess out of flour. By the time we left, I was covered in it and it was all through my purse, which I mistakenly put under the table at the beginning of class.

Class this particular week was baking biscuits. All of the kids make one big batch of dough, and then each child gets a portion of the batch to finish off their own individual biscuits. To make the big batch, each child gets to put in a portion of each ingredient. So for example, if the batch calls for 1 cup of flour and there are four children, each child gets to put in a 1/4 cup. This was B's first attempt ever at measuring a dry ingredient, especially one that can get REALLY messy. And while every piece of me wanted to get in there and help to avoid the mess, this class is really so that he can LEARN. He can't learn if I'm doing it for him. So here's how that went ... 

He did really well for his first try ever! After all the kids added their ingredients, the instructor ran it through the stand mixer and gave each child their portion of the dough for them to roll out and cut into biscuits.

After that, Chef Chad put all of the biscuits on a baking sheet, keeping them separated so that each child got back the same biscuits that they had rolled out and cut. While they were baking, each of the children helped clean up and had some lemonade to pass the time. They also whipped up a batch of cinnamon sugar to put on their warm biscuits once they came out of the oven. They each sprinkled their biscuits and then got to taste test their results. And since each child ended up with anywhere from three to give biscuits, they got to wrap up the rest of them to take them home. B clutched on to his with dear life the entire trip home - he was so proud of those biscuits. And of course, as soon as we got home, he had to show them to his dad, and his brother promptly licked the cinnamon sugar off all of them. Anyway ... our first cooking class was quite a success! We've now gone to two additional ones, so blog posts for those will be forthcoming!