Cooking lessons are going well. The young lady in question really enjoyed going through the slow-cooker cookbook and selecting the four recipes she would be making this week. Then I showed her how to organize her shopping list into grocery store departments, and we went shopping.
She is also enjoying the cooking itself, although she tends to get distracted. Just about every time she completes a step she walks away from the project and I have to call her back. "What is the next step?" I say. "Oh yea," she says. Then she happily returns and reads the directions for the next step. We need to work on the "stick with it till you are done" skill-set. We also need to work on the "not skipping a part of the step" skill. When you are cooking, every sentence matters.
Our lessons have included such practical matters as: how to handle raw meat (and the cleaning with soap and hot water required afterwards); how to peal and cut-up onions (while avoiding touching your watering eyes); and how to do dishes. Much to my amazement, she acted like she had never done dishes before (except to rinse them and put them in the dishwasher).
We also review her homework every evening and discuss the five food groups at every meal. In our spare time we are working on a puzzle. Because she gets on the school bus so early each day, I have been getting to work early. I also leave work 15 minutes early to pick her up from the after-school program she participates in. Actually, I think it is a good idea (for single-parent families) to have a program where the child stays after school in a supervised environment (or at least much better than some of the alternatives). She gets her homework done, and there is no TV available.
Yesterday a co-worker asked me how I liked "being a parent." I said it was fine, but thought to myself that this was no comparison to the real thing; not to mention that it is a lot less work. I would be deceiving myself if I compared staying with a pretty-much-already-raised 13-year old for 4 days with the real job of parenting!
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I'm laughing at your description of cooking lessons. I'm sure you can imagine how different cooking lessons coming from me would be. :-) D1 will probably prefer your style, but she'll have to put up with me most of the time!
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