Cooking with Leila

She's not a terrible cook for a two-year-old; she seems to get the concept on the whole.

I've been trying to coax myself into making broccoli cheese soup for dinner for about a week now. Micah has actually asked for it every night of the week which coaxed the self-coaxing. It's not hard to make and I had everything I needed for it, I just didn't want to because I hate scraping the counters after I make the noodles. I know. It's not a difficult task, it doesn't even take very long, but there's something about dough stuck on the counter top that I don't like. I think it is that when you go to the work to make the noodles, you don't want to have an entire counter top to deal with afterwards. It's not like they're that hard to make either; flour, salt, eggs, water, mix em up, cut em and toss em into boiling water... but it seemed like a daunting task and I pushed it off until tonight.

So tonight while the Dell guy was here working on our computer, I sat on the couch whining about how much I didn't want to get up and begging for ideas out for dinner. Would you believe Burger King was the only suggestion? When all the kids went outside, I insisted that Leila stay in the house so that I could keep an eye on her and the Dell guy at the same time. And, what better motivation to keep her in than to let her help me make the noodles? This was an exciting alternative to playing with the big kids, so she hopped to it. Before I had my ingredients assembled, she had her step stool up to the counter and was breaking pretzels into a bowl. Each ingredient that I added to my bowl, she added to hers. When I stirred, she stirred and flipped flour-covered pretzels all over the kitchen. When it was time to cut the noodles, she grabbed the pizza cutter and went to town, only on my dough. I didn't mind because the kids don't care if the noodles are uniform, but when I turned around to scoop some into the, pot, it seemed like there were less than I started with. She had a fist full of noodles that she was kneading into her pretzels. I used to get bent out of shape about these types of activities, but now I just laugh, pick out the pretzels, and toss them in the pot.

It's times like this that I think about my mom and my baby sister. By the time Sarah was in grade school by herself, my mom was working as a teacher's aid in her school and they spent lots of hours there together. I was always a little jealous that when Sarah got out of school she got to hang out in the classroom with my mom and the other teachers. I always imagined them having loads of fun cleaning chalkboards and cutting out shapes for holiday decor.

It appeared to me that something had changed about my mom by that time and now I know what it was. Somewhere along the way you settle in to motherhood, probably about the time you realize it will end someday, and you try to savor what you have left. The tail-enders just get the most benefit of that because they're still sweet and innocent and don't question you as the final authority in their little worlds; in fact, they still like it.