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Tiny Turkeys
Keep Toddlers Busy While You Prepare Holiday Dinner
By I.J. Schecter
My sons love to bake with their mommy – muffins, banana bread, cookies, you name it. How adorable their little cheeks and foreheads look covered in varying degrees of flour, salt, sugar and chocolate sauce. How innocently humorous are their volume miscalculations, ineffectual stirring methods, frequent spills and tendency to pour most of the ingredients beyond the edge of the mixing bowl rather than into it.
Such special, messy projects, of course, usually occur on Saturday mornings, in pajamas, with no time pressure and little consequence. If the cookies are a little too small or the banana bread ends up a bit too sweet, it's hardly cause for distress.
During the holidays, the situation in our house is a bit different – as it no doubt is in yours. When you're basting a turkey, edging cranberry sauce into a bowl or carefully warming a pumpkin pie – with two dozen of your closest friends and family due to arrive in a few hours – there's considerably less room for trial and error, imprecise measurements or fun chaos. Cooking a holiday dinner plus the presence of little people can be a less-than-productive combination.
Here are 3 ways to keep your tiny turkeys strategically occupied for those critical hours of culinary preparation.
"When I let my kids measure even a tablespoon of this or that, they always tell Daddy that they made dinner, and we make a big deal of how proud we are!" says Stephanie Chousky, mother of two from Toronto, Canada.
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