Baking, sharing, giving, receiving

As most every other typical two year old in the history of the world, Jay's  been a tad precocious lately and challenging many of the things I thought I knew about this parenting thing.

Never one to back down from a challenge, Daddio and I have changed our approach in many ways, changed our thinking and our actions in hopes of maintaining some clear boundaries while keeping Jay from full-blown meltdowns every five minutes and talking ugly "between the buoys" as they say.

One of the areas we're struggling with is sharing. With the start of preschool and new baby sister, most of the ways we've addressed sharing is "Don't take things away", "give her that back", etc.

So, after months of struggle in this area (some weeks more than others, like everything, it happens in phases) I've started trying to teach sharing, rather than correcting mistakes. And, since I am most comfortable in the kitchen, we'll start here.

Jay gets a big wooden spoon and a bowl of bananas to mash. I measure and together we mix a batch of banana bread.

We prepare four small pans and bake them up and I wrap them--for sharing.

 

Our first batch we shared with a family that is friends with our family who lost someone this week. Jay overheard me on the phone saying "that's so sad" ( this was the morning of our first banana bread day, we'd just taken it out of the oven) he asked "who's sad?" So I got off of the phone and told him who was sad, but not why, and he said "we take her some and make her happy?!?" By the way he was smiling, I knew something was clicking.

As we were baking today's batch, I asked Jay who we should share his bread with. He was stacking the little pans and as he laid them out he named teachers at his school. Great! So, batch #2 will be delivered tomorrow.

The goal is that he can actively learn sharing and giving and happiness, rather than simply be corrected a for taking a toy for the gazillionth time.I hope we can continue this project and similar ways of actively learning to share rather than "no, No, NO" and "don't, stop, quit".

So, if you know us and we randomly show up on your doorstep bearing baked goods, I hope you enjoy them and know that I'm grateful for your gratitude as we experiment with life lessons...and recipes.

And if you're looking for a GOOD go-to banana bread recipe- look no further. This one is great and not too complicated to manage with a 2 year old in the kitchen-which is saying a LOT. We added chocolate chips today so, its a great Chocolate Chip Banana Bread Recipe too! Here is the link to lots of banana bread variations that look awesome, too!

Oh and today, we also baked a big loaf to keep at our house. Lessons learned for a happy marriage.