Cooking Lessons

A child is called into the kitchen to slice apples with the cool tool that the kids love to use. She has a hard time placing the apples on the tines straight, so that the corer cuts out the core instead of the good part of the apple.

Lesson the child learns? If you can't get the apple on straight, the machine often breaks the apple into big chunks instead of slicing it nicely.

Lesson the mom learns? If you have to cut cores out of already-sliced apples, it would've been easier to do it yourself.



A child is making the topping for Apple Betty. He needs to measure the brown sugar. What's left in the container "looks about right." So he asks the mother. She says it's not enough and that he needs to open the new bag to get more sugar. So he dumps the contents of the container into the melted butter and proceeds to open the new bag of sugar.

Lesson the child learns? Once you've dumped sugar into a liquid, it is very hard to measure the sugar to know how much is there, and how much more you need.

Lesson the mom learns? Sometimes it's easier to do it yourself.



The child who is neglecting to measure the sugar plops the tightly packed brown sugar into a bowl of melted butter.

Lesson the child learns? Throwing a huge clump of brown sugar into melted butter surprisingly causes the melted butter to splash violently out of the bowl. (Who'da thunk it?)

Lesson the mom learns? Sometimes it's easier to do it yourself.


Now, how does the mom unlearn the lesson that her children so thoroughly taught her today? Because if she doesn't unlearn her lesson, the children will never get a chance to make more mistakes and eventually learn to do it right.

Oh, but melted butter splashed all over.....