Real Help

Yesterday, Issa and I decided to take a little adventure. It wasn't much of an adventure. We just walked to pick Evan up. I learned from the last walk-to-school debacle and took the wagon. This trip was only .8 miles, but we live at the bottom of two hills, so it felt much longer. It also took much longer than I had planned. We did enjoy looking at the fall sky and talking about our days, but by the time we got home I was really behind on getting dinner started.

I started cooking our chorizo hominy chili and cornbread, and the kids asked to help. They help with dinner almost every night, but "help" often slows me down. I wanted so badly to say no thank you, but I took a big deep breath and said yes. If dinner wasn't on the table exactly as six the world wouldn't come to an end. Then...this happened:
At some point, these two really learned how to cook. Their help really was help!

Issa did all of the sauteing and stirring:

That freed me up just to prep and add to the pot.

Evan did any rinsing:

He loved rinsing the hominy, especially.

Dinner was on the table by six, and we even had time to read a couple of stories while the chili simmered. I normally would have used that time to clean up the kitchen, but the kids felt so big to me that I needed to take advantage of the time to snuggle while they were feeling little.