Cooking with Patrick

I like to cook with my toddler. If you walk into my kitchen, you won't find much childproofing going on. There are no knob covers, no stove blocker, just one cabinet with a lock, the one with my cleaning supplies, which coincidentally are becoming safer and safer as we go along. My child has free roam of this area. In the beginning, I really wanted a learning tower. The idea of the learning tower was everything that I embodied. The space it took up was not. So I didn't get one. We have this stool in our kitchen.



It is an Ikea Bekvam stool. We've actually had it for quite some time, but when my two year old adopted it, it finally came to life. I think it works better than the learning tower for us. He is able to move it around to where he'd like to be at any given moment. Only once have we had a toe pinching incident. He loves to be where we are, and he loves to help.



If you give him a task, he more than willingly takes on the responsibility. He'll stir anything in a bowl, run the Kitchenaid to his little heart's content, and even try and help cut things in half (which we work with him carefully, as he proclaims "Patrick do it!")

He's learning new things. That's what is most important. How do you cook with your toddler?