Cutting the Zucchini

Today Grady and I had a pretty calm day at home.  We went to Costco, but otherwise we stayed at home and got things done.  We read for a long time.  I got a bunch of books at the library book sale this weekend, so we have a ton of new books to check out.  I found Froggy Learns to Swim and a Muppet Babies book that we read today.  Something was pretty funny about each of them - Grady laughed a bunch.

We cleaned the bathroom and then got down to the task of making dinner.  Minestrone soup was on the menu (even though the boys refuse to eat something that veggie-laden).

Grady is always asking me if he can cut up the food, so zucchinis were perfect for him today.  He cut and cut and cut.  He was very serious about it and totally didn't look at the camera at all when I took pictures of him.  (Most of the time, if the camera is out, he'll look at me and fake smile when I'm taking pictures.)  He loved cutting the logs of zucchini.  He made it through all four zucchinis, slicing them up with the little knife.  He got through two or three of the zucchinis, cutting the rounds into quarters.

I was surprised at how high his attention span was for this round of cooking.  Usually he sticks around for a minute and stirs, then gets tired and leaves.  This time, he stuck around pretty much the whole preparation time.  He opened the cans, poured food into the pot, sliced the zucchini and opened each of the spice bottles.  Which led to a whole pile of turmeric on the floor when I was looking through the cupboard and something fell, knocking the opened turmeric on the floor.

As a side note, turmeric is sort-of rust colored, but when you wet it, it pretty solidly stains everything yellow.  Once I had all of the powder wiped up, it took a couple extra paper towels to clean up the yellow stain on the linoleum.

Anyway, the morals of this story: 1) zucchini is good for practice cutting (pears and apples are still too complicated and hard), 2) Grady does not want to be a chef because he's still going to be a cement truck driver, 3) vacuum turmeric, don't wet it and 4) even helping prepare food does not mean your child will want to eat it, but let them prepare it anyway.