Babies Can’t Cook

You think it won’t happen, but even holidays have a way of getting jumbled up and blurry in your memories. The year you tried cooking the turkey in one of those plastic roasting bags – but misread the instructions and ended up with a shrink-wrapped bird and bits of melted plastic on everyone’s plate – was that 10 years ago? Or more? The year the neighbors deep-fried a bird for the first time – and melted some of the vinyl siding on their garage. When was that? The time your toddler nephew hurled his drumstick like some deranged king out of Game of Thrones – was he two that year or maybe three? It makes me wish I kept a journal. There is only one Thanksgiving that I remember with absolute clarity. I was a new mom, and my first child was six months old. She was a pretty reasonable baby where crying was concerned, but seemingly had no need for sleep. In fact, I don’t think she actually slept through the night till like, middle school.

Anyway, I had this whole beautiful movie in my head about how fun it was going to be to cook Thanksgiving dinner with my tiny sous chef by my side. I figured she’d sit in her high chair and look angelic – possibly wave a wooden spoon around now and then. I had a brand new oven mitt with a turkey on it and how fun that would be for her, right? Best. Time. Ever. Mommy’s little helper helping mommy fix Thanksgiving!

Wrong. Not best time ever. For starters, she picked this day to hate the high chair. The “fun” oven mitt was only fun to throw on the floor – along with every other toy or distraction I offered. The wooden spoon was a hit until it wasn’t, a period of time spanning three and a half minutes at most. What she wanted instead was the shiny silver colander full of fresh green beans. The colander I should have moved when I moved said baby in said hated high chair closer to the sink where I was working. When the colander hit the floor it made such a funny noise that the baby clapped and laughed and I think whoever lives in that house today probably still comes across a shriveled green bean every now and again because those beans went everywhere.

Did you know that babies sometimes poke themselves in the eye? Did you know that the most likely time for this to occur is when you are up to your shoulders in the carcass of a raw Butterball? It’s a fact. Did you also know that singing Raffi’s “Bananaphone” is an excellent distraction for a baby who has poked herself in the eye and doesn’t understand that you must wash your hands before touching her face but that shouting. “ring ring ring ring ring ring bananaphone” louder than a baby can scream will do so much damage to your short-term memory that you will forget to turn the oven on?

So the turkey had an hour or so to sit in a cold oven where at least it was quiet. Out in the kitchen, all was chaos. I tried to peel potatoes; she grabbed at them. I gave her a small, unpeeled potato. She studied it briefly, gummed it, made a horrified face, and then dropped the spud directly onto the head of the waiting dog below. I piled a few more toys onto the tray of the high chair. Nope. She wanted my toys, which in this case were mostly knives and fire. In this completely psychotic fashion we somehow cobbled together dinner.

And dinner was late, of course, thanks to Raffi, but everything ended up more or less cooked. Including most of my right hand. I really should have used that fun turkey oven mitt as an oven mitt and not as a puppet – there’s a teachable moment. A neighbor just happened to have some hospital-grade burn spray lying around, which meant I was able to eat the seven bites allotted to all parents of crazy six month-old babies, catch my breath, and celebrate the fact that we hadn’t set anything major ablaze. It was the most hectic, stressful, crazy Thanksgiving I have ever had – and one of my favorites. I still laugh remembering 1) how nuts it was and 2) how nuts I was to expect anything different. I mean, who thinks a baby can help in the kitchen? The best part of it all? It set the template for every Thanksgiving to follow. I may be a wound-up perfectionist foodie the other 364 days of the year, but on this one day, my only goals are to get that turkey roasted, remember to use an oven mitt, and laugh till it hurts. Happy Thanksgiving to you! And trust me on this: don’t give your baby a potato.

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