Day 21: Baking With Children (aka Immersion Therapy)

We have been doing a lot of baking.

Apparently so have lots of other people, because when I went to the grocery store last weekend, there was no baking powder anywhere.

That was something I wasn’t anticipating a shortage of.

But my dad came to the rescue and found some at WalMart when he had to go there to pick up his medication during the really early old people hours.

He dropped it off at our house. He just pulled into the driveway and put it in my car. The kids saw him through the window in the family room because we were all in there watching Adventures In Babysitting (the kids loved it).

The driveway is about 50 yards from the front door.

Number 4 and Number 7 ran to the door, threw it open, and waved like lunatics from the front step.

Papa burst into tears, buried his face in his hands, and got back in his car.

He’s still a little emotional.

He sent me a text a little later that said,

Tell the kids I’m okay.

I was glad to see them.

(Working on the boohooo)

But that’s not the point of this post.

Baking. That was the point.

We’ve been doing a lot of baking, and the kids asked if we could have cake for dessert.

I told them they could as long as they made it.

I had some boxes of cake mix. Two were chocolate and one was vanilla.

We couldn’t come to a consensus on which flavor to make, so we decided to make two.

A vanilla cake and chocolate cupcakes.

Baking with kids is not an exercise in home economics.

It’s not a lesson a real life exercise in life skills.

You know what it is?

It’s fucking intense OCD immersion therapy.

Baking with children either cures you of obsessive compulsive disorder, or it sends you straight to the nuthouse.

Being home for three straight weeks with five kids, I’m not sure which scenario I find myself in right now.

It’s pretty fucking nutty here.

But I made it through the baking without correcting anything or jumping in.

So I think the immersion therapy worked.

Nobody lost any digits in the mixer.

There was actually some cooperation happening.

Number 7 got chocolate in places I didn’t know it was possible to get chocolate in.

And this is how she filled her muffin tin.

Forget the fact that there was chocolate everywhere.

What kind of animal leaves a row of three empty cups in the middle of the pan?

In the end, it was a success.

The kids literally did every step by themselves from start to finish.

Number 4 had never oiled and floured a pan before, so she learned a new skill.

Number 5 learned how to operate the mixer from start to finish.

And I learned I can handle lots of imperfection in the kitchen.

But we might not do another home economics class for a little while.

There’s only so much a woman can handle in twenty-one days.