Baking Brownies with a Four Year Old in 25 Easy Steps.

1. Decide to make brownies with your four year old daughter! You have seen pictures of this mother daughter bonding experience in Parenting magazine and everyone looks so dang happy!


2. Leaf thru cookbooks and guide your child away from the Buche de Noel and towards the brownie with sprinkles.



3. Remove child from the kitchen while you prepare all of the ingredients for easy four year old assembly (try to ignore the fact that you could have finished mixing everything and had it in the oven by the time you are done ”organizing”)


4. Remind your child to wash her hands.


5. Send her back to try again. With soap.


6. Smell hands and send protesting four year old back to try again.


7. Announce that if she keeps pouting there will be no baking.


8. Secretly hope that she continues pouting.


9. Help her with the pink side of the double sided apron, “Not the other side because we used the other side last time and not the owl one because the owl one is blue and doesn’t have any pink on it and pink is better”


10. Preheat oven, mix a bunch of ingredients together, pour into baking dish.


11. Explain to her that she can't try the batter because it contains raw egg.


12. Apply sprinkles.


13. Send child back to the bathroom to wash her hands after licking a handful of sprinkles off of her palm.


14. Eat some batter while she is washing her hands.


15. Finish sprinkles and put back in the oven to bake.


16. After unsuccessfully convincing your child to leave the kitchen so you can clean up, teach the insistent young one how to scrub a bowl.


17. Wipe up the dish water from the floor, the counters, the clock and the wall calendar.


18. Have the following conversation

Child: is it done yet?
You: Not yet.
Child: (In exasperated tones) When is it EVER going to be ready.
You: 18 more minutes.




19. Repeat step 18, only changing the number of minutes. Do this 17 times.




20. Remove brownies from the oven and set them out to cool.




21. Have the following conversation.

Child: Is it done yet?
You: It needs to cool down.
Child: But it’s taking for a LONG time. How many minutes?
You: 10 minutes.Repeat step 12. Do this 5 times. Give up.




22. Mangle the too hot sprinkle brownies while digging out a piece so that your child can have a taste.




23. Congratulate yourself on taking the time and effort to make memories with the child that is whining and crying because she has burned her tongue on a hot mess of brownie.




24. Swear that you will never do this again, until you tuck your kid in for nap and she says “Mama, I love baking with you, we should do this all the time” Smile and realize it is all worthwhile.




25. Have a brownie...and a drink.