Humor: Cooking for Children

Sometimes as a busy tired mom you would rather do anything other than "cooking for children." This was the case one day while helping my mother do some things around her house with my five-year-old daughter in tow.

My daughter kept asking us to make her lunch. We were in the middle of a job that we could not interrupt at the moment and asked my daughter if she could make herself a sandwich or something easy to tide her over until we finished the job. We told her not to use the stove without our supervision and suggested a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a glass of milk.

My daughter tugged on me a couple more times and then bounced off to the kitchen. It was not long before my mother and I smelled something burning. We dropped what we were doing and ran to the kitchen. We found my daughter gazing at my mother's brand new toaster as the smoke was pouring out of it. We unplugged the toaster and looked down into it's bread slots. There were two slices of bread in each slot with something in the middle of the bread that we couldn't identify. As the toaster cooled, we began to pry the bread out of the slots. We asked my daughter why there was two pieces of bread in each slot. She looked at us with those beautiful blue eyes and said, "I decided to make a grilled cheese sandwich and you told me not to use the stove." I was very proud of her inventive idea while sticking to the rules. My mother was centered on the fact that this toaster was so new that she hadn't even used it yet and now it was filled with burnt cheese and crumbs. It took us a good long while to clean the toaster out as best we could.

The next morning we all gathered in mom's kitchen for breakfast. Mom and I were busy making eggs and sausages. Mom popped a couple of pieces of bread in the toaster and suddenly the toaster started bouncing all over the counter. We pulled the plug out of the wall and caught the toaster as it was heading for the counter edge. Suddenly a mouse came flying out of the bread slot right past the bread in the slot. My mother picked up the toaster and tossed it in the trash never to use it again. Apparently we had a mouse in the house and the mouse in the house found a bit of cheese left in the bottom of the toaster from the day before. That toaster never did serve up a slice of toast in it's lifetime.