All By Herself

My firstborn baked cookies ALL by herself yesterday! I had lapsed into re researching homeschooling and relized that it' not all about academics, but also about attaining skills based on each child's interests.

I had also asked each of them how they learn best.

N: listening

S: visual and hands on

H: visual and hands on


For summer, H asked for an active endeavor. Since all the other sports have fees, I told him tennis, because it's free. He's so enthusiastic about it that he reminded me about it when I had already forgotten about it. When I asked who wanted to play tennis, only he and N raised their hands. I wondered why S didn't want to when she has a natural athletic ability. I then asked her,

"Do you want to take the cake decorating class again?"

She nodded emphatically.

Bingo! This girl is into domestic stuff. The only difference between me and her is athletic ability. So yesterday I told her she can bake cookies. She understood enough that it meant, her doing it alone, all by herself.

I told them to choose a recipe, let me look at the ingredients for approval. After they did, S set to work and measured out all the ingredients by herself. Of course, she already knew how to level off the dry ingredients when measuring them after watching me countless times. So I din't have to do much coaching, much to my surprise.

I cooked dinner while S and N make their cookies, N with a lot of singing and chirping, while S seriously concentrating on her tasks. I only had to aid her in clipping on the paddle whip on the Kitchen Aid and assuring her that her sugar-butter-egg mixture looked fine.

"But it looks wrong," she said.

"No, it's fine," I said, and left her to it to attend to my beef, kofta and 'masjid masjid rice'. H had complained that he prefers masjid masjid rice as compared to masjid rice, which was actually just a concoction I made up when whipping up the Basmati rice. So I made the proper 'masjid rice' which has now become 'masjid masjid rice'.

S put the cookie sheets in the oven herself, took it out herself and I had to help her take the cookies of the sheet, but that's about it. They cleaned up themselves and I simply washed the dirty dishes.

To top it off, the cookies are "the best I've ever tasted!" Seriously, they chose a perfect recipe. I myself don't like to bake cookies just because I have to sit in front of the oven as compared to baking cakes. I had never tasted a cookie like that. For someone who loves chocolate, the cookies are just heavenly.

I went to bed last night thinking, "My little girl baked her own cookied all by herself!"