Construction in the Kitchen

Today, I was preparing lunch this morning (we had plans to visit the aquarium and then go to Smale Park) and Hulk was trying to drive his little tike car through the kitchen. Now, our kitchen isn't the smallest kitchen I've ever worked in but it's certainly not big enough to fit a breakfast table, a high chair with a 7 month old throwing her food on the floor, me (making lunch), and a little tike car with a bossy four year old.

While Hulk was beeping at me to move, I became frustrated – I'm trying to prepare a fun family day for him! But then, I felt the spirit give me a prompting.

"This is a construction site, you need to wait until the construction workers tell you that you can go." Personally, I felt this was GENIUS. Hulk loves all things emergency and construction vehicles. If it's got wheels or wings or flashing lights and goes fast or makes loud noises – Hulk wants to be involved. When he was three he told me that he wanted to be a fire truck when he grew up.

Well, Hulk latched onto the idea of the kitchen becoming a construction sight and ran with it – LITERALLY. He got out of his car and ran to get his orange soccer cones. He then placed these cones around the kitchen. Now I was tripping over cones but this was an upgrade to working around a little tike car trying to run me down.

By this point I had let the Little Viking Girl loose and she LOVED the cones. And, of course, Hulk hated that she was "messing up" the construction sight.

So JC said, "She's a construction worker, look, she's wearing an orange diaper."

AND HULK TOOK IT! He loved the idea.

And I finished putting together our lunch and snacks.

What did this teach me? That it's much better to play with my son and feed his imagination than yell at him to get out of my way. Had I yelled at him he probably would have been fine, he may have sulked in another room, but it would have for sure tainted our morning. We had much more fun pretending the kitchen was a construction zone.

And we had fun at the aquarium (but a thunderstorm rolled in on the way to the park so we chose to go home instead – BOO!)

Northern Kentucky University has a weird obsession with Paddlefish

Petting Sting Rays

The Shark Bridge (his favorite part)