Teach Them Young

Since I had some frozen pumpkin in the freezer, had just read an article about not inhibiting your toddler from doing "big things" (like cracking eggs into a bowl), and some spare time, we made pumpkin bread the other day. Believe it or not, it turned out pretty good!

We have been blessed to have some pretty amazing people in our lives, and the other day little man had a wonderful time hanging out with some of those friends (and is still telling people about the experience). Between two households, our friends have two cats, two guinea pigs, two dogs, two horses, one cow, and a bunch of chickens. Even though the picture below shows little man feeding the cow, the chickens really stole the show for the day (I just forgot to take pictures). Not only did little man bottle-feed the calf, he went into the coop with my friend and collected eggs. Thankfully they had an over abundance of eggs that day, because little man was not going to part with the container of eggs. I did manage to get them away from him for the drive home.

I had already decided that we needed to do something special with the eggs, and during nap time I was reading one of my parenting books as it was talking about building confidence. So, I thought, why not bake pumpkin bread? I have pumpkin in the freezer that I saved this fall, and I have the eggs, the local flour, and all of the other baking supplies. It is time to teach little man how to crack an egg.

He did pretty good with it. The only shell that landed in the bowl was the one that came from the egg mommy cracked. Little man did a great job mixing and adding stuff to the bowl and the results were excellent. Although, I have to admit, we required some clean up....