Chaos Of Cooking With Kids

The hour of family meal preparation also ends up being an hour of mommy/ daughter time while Hunter is at football practice and my husband is trying to wrap up some work and get home to eat with us.

Last night I was going to quick take some pictures of how I was using my garden fresh tomatoes in homemade spaghetti sauce and also freezing tomatoes. My mom had given me some tips and since I was putting them to good use I had my camera out to document. 

But that will be another blog post, for another day. 

The girls were being quite the active helpers, standing together in The Learning Tower, while helping me make tomato sauce.

They were also eating tomatoes before I could make them into sauce.

Once the sauce was complete, we had some simmering for spaghetti sauce on the stove and also some ready to freeze. We were doing pretty good or so I thought at that moment.

The very outgoing 2 1/2 year old Miss E wanted to try drinking tomato sauce.

She was not impressed but decided that her tomato eating younger sister Anika Iris might like a try.

I turned around for a split second and then quickly took a picture to capture the moment of them sharing the tomato sauce drink.

Then chaos occurred.
Miss E dumped the entire cup all over Anika. During this time the water started to boil for the spaghetti.

Elizabeth started cleaning up the mess as I held Anika to get her cleaned up and out of her tomato soaked clothes.

Just as I was wiping tomato sauce from Anika’s ear, E shrieked “I have to go potty!”
That is a 2 year old emergency.
Somehow, we got through the chaos with out tears or a potty accident.

It was a memory making hour in the depths of chaos of cooking with kids.

But despite the chaos, we pulled off a wonderful family meal that brought smiles to two of our favorite faces that came home for supper.

The smiles were a result of the peach cobbler that came out of the oven at the end of supper. It was so warm the ice cream melted all over it and was superbly good.

How did we pull off peach cobbler? Thanks to peaches we froze in August and the handy dandy Calhoun Bend Mill mixes I keep on hand. I also mixed it up with the girls pulling on my legs and them not helping me measure the peaches.

By 7PM, despite the smiles and full tummies, the chaos had me wiped and we were just approaching bath time which thankfully my husband oversees, much more efficiently than I ever could.

I paused for a moment.

Is my cooking with kids to make a family meal worth the effort?

I think most definitely so.