our little helper

I've never been a big fan of playing, and can only stomach so many board games, but my son is a sponge for attention. I recently had a light-bulb moment when I was trying to figure out how to spend more time with Calum without having to sit and build lego for hours. He could be my kitchen helper! Megan is now old enough to be bored by my requests for help in the kitchen, which tear her away from the far more interesting anime forums she likes to browse in her spare time. But at nearly six years old, Calum is eager to throw down his PS2 controller and climb onto a chair in the kitchen to do pretty much whatever we ask.



After helping me to bake a dozen muffins yesterday, Calum has been regularly and firmly reminding me that he plans to help with lunch AND dinner EVERY day. Tonight he helped to cook a shepherd's pie, and now Megan has roped him into doing all the "boring" parts of an apple crisp for dessert. They are having an amusing conversation about how he is her minion and how she is at least twice as evil as he is. How sweet!

It's surprising how much he has learned from all those video games he's so obsessed with - he was stirring some onions around in a pan earlier and asked me, "Is this called sauteing?" While I was puzzling out where the heck he learned that word, he said, "I have a silver medal in sauteing in Cooking Mama."

At least I can quite honestly say that he knows more about cooking than people twice his age -- Megan reports that most of the kids in her sixth grade class have barely used a kitchen appliance. Apparently when asked by the teacher if they had "tried cooking anything at home", only two people other than she had actually done so, and their cooking experiences included toast and Eggo waffles. Megan, on the other hand, single-handedly ran the kitchen for the week after Jeff and I had our wisdom teeth out a year ago. I suspect this is the legacy of all those years of homeschooling, and though I don't expect to be homeschooling Calum, I don't want him to miss out on the kitchen experience.