We’ve Made Another One
May 20th, 2006 Caroline
Ben is well known in his small social circle for his love of kitchen appliances. Over the years he’s been given two toy handmixers, two toasters, one stand mixer, and a blender, and before he had his own stash we used to let him play with the real ones, too. He’d ask to play with our friends’ appliances also, always reminding them politely to take out the sharp blades, first, please, and make sure the appliance was unplugged. He could give you an inventory of who has what appliance; one friend, not much of a cook, was surprised to learn from Ben that she even had a particular mixer. Stand mixers, stick blenders, hand mixers, milk frothers – he loves them all.
Ben’s always had a lot of sit and study in him. We never worried that he’d hurt himself or break one of our appliances by playing with it. When he got the toy ones, he would put his wooden vegetables carefully in the toy blender or mixer bowl, turn the machine on, turn it off when he was done playing with it. He always, that is, pretended to cook with these toys. I was surprised when a friend’s son used the toy blender as a crash-landing rocket ship; it had never been so abused.
Now Eli is quite a bit younger than Ben was when he first got a toy mixer, but he’s just altogether a different kind of person. To quote from Parenthood, he likes to ram things. For instance, knowing only that occasionally the toy hand mixer makes a nice noise, he will sit, pick up the mixer, look at it briefly, and toss it on the floor. Pick it up, look, toss it on the floor. After a dozen or so tosses, the mixer lands on its switch and whirrs to life. “Dah!” crows Eli, satisfied with his work, and watches happily as it buzzes along the floor.
Where the real appliances are concerned, however, we’ve learned he shares his big brother’s passion. Eli enjoys making cappuccino with Tony so much that when Tony comes downstairs in the morning, Eli dispenses with any hug or greeting and crawls straight to the kitchen, sitting on the floor near the machine gazing up at it like a pointer. The other day he was in the kitchen when I used the food processor to make biscuits. I feel like I’ve neglected his education, but obviously this was the first time he’d noticed another major kitchen appliance at work . He ran, if you can say that a crawling person ran, to the corner to watch, calling out excitedly “Dah! Dah! Dah!” For the rest of the day, he would occasionally go check out that corner of the kitchen, the first time that side has interested him as much as the side with the cappuccino maker, and he keeps “asking” me to turn the machine on again.
It wasn’t until Ben’s third birthday that I planned his birthday feast by how many kitchen appliances we could use together, but with his first birthday coming up, Eli has me thinking along those lines already…
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