[think of a something thursday!]

I make forays into super-parental-book-mommy-land, trying to do the connecty-fun activities with my kids that we all can enjoy. Activities that also give them a taste of the lifeskills they’ll need some day. Sewing, cooking, shopping for supermarket deals, snaking a drain, running off fraudulent roof repair men claiming to be inspectors for your insurance company … skills kids of both sexes need in equal measure.

But you’ve also got to know your audience. I watched some of the moms before me go through this - trying to figure out an age-appropriate activity and have it blow up in their faces. Not only skill-level appropriate activities, but time-appropriate activites, too. No one is having fun if Mom or Dad is in the kitchen or doing most of the obvious work.

Heck, it was only last month that I finally learned from a mom friend how to let my kid crack open an egg and enjoy it without getting egg slime everywhere (hold egg in one hand, rap with a spoon held in the other). On a scale of Sandra Lee to Alton Brown , I’m coming up close on a one-man Rachael Ray … but not that close.

When I was a wee lass, we didn’t have fancy pre-cut cookies in a package. We dug up chocolate chips from under mushrooms with a used toothpick and used barbed wire to press hash marks into our peanut butter cookies. Well, maybe not.

But we did graduate through our cooking paces at an age-appropriate level. Our first flatbreads were patted out meticulously in the time it took our adults to pat or roll out a couple dozen, and by the time we hit our tweens, we were actually pulling together cookies from scratch. But in the interveining years before I started trying to keep little hands busy until bedtime, I managed to forget it all.

I think our first experiment was pizza? I was smart enough to get pre-cooked crusts, but just picture a two year old with spaghetti sauce everywhere. Yeah. Not so much. Kiddo was also just not that interested. So I snuck off to the kitchen and finished it up out of sight; the kid was proud to show off the pizza they made, however. I built on that as kiddo matured.

Our next experiments were cookies and bread. Again I pre-prepped some ingredients, and faked others. All in all, we’ve probably done several dozen cooking experiments together over the years, and I hope to do more, racheting up the difficulty as I go along.

Meantime, I’m still adjusting my experiments to keep the fun up and the costs down. While I won’t toss a cake kit at the kid and say “have at it” any time soon, I can still start to teach the basics of measuring and timing to add to the groundwork we’ve laid of stirring and pouring (and cleaning up). And figuring out how much to prep to save me time and not buy those expensive “throw at the oven” cookie kits: Make your own!

I gathered your basic tube of dough, a few plates, and a melon baller. Sat down for about 20 minutes of basic prep work: measuring out right-sized balls, plating them (don’t let them touch each other), then freezing for a few hours (we had a date with a fire hose to attend to). At naptime later that day, I took the plates and plates and plates of dough balls from the freezer; poured the balls into sealable containers.

When kiddo was ready to bake, we counted out the number of cookie balls we wanted, and put the rest away for another day. Bonus: no more wasted half packages of dough rotting in the fridge until I remember them!

Of course, I figure this out right about the time he’s ready to learn to scoop his own dough balls, but I’ll keep it up my sleeve for the next batch of kidlets maturing into the “place them on the sheet without touching” phase. And spend $1.00 per batch of cookies instead of the $4.00 of the pre-shaped minis.