Kids being kids, they love to pretend to be superheroes or Vikings or anything fantastical you can imagine. Oddly enough, they also love to pretend to do mundane adult things like cooking and going to the DMV to renew their vehicle registration. Frankly, I’ve never met any children who wanted to pretend to renew their vehicle registration, but I’m sure it must happen somewhere. Whenever our kids visit a children’s museum, we always see a mob scene at the play kitchen area. I’m not sure what the deal is, but I suppose kids like to pretend to be grown-ups. My niece has a play kitchen, and all three kids love to pretend to cook eggs and boil potatoes.
For Christmas, my wife’s family got our kids the KidKraftplay Deluxe Let’s Cook play kitchen. It’s certainly been a while since Christmas, but I finally had a lengthy block of time to clear out some space and put it together early Sunday evening. The instruction manual advised between 1 – 1.5 hours, but I knew that’s never accurate. From my experience, these projects often require you to tack on an additional 2 hours to any job. It took me close to four hours, as the kids constantly tried to “help” me. Still, I’ve realized that even though they aren’t actually helping, they need to feel like they are.
The kitchen turned out rather nice, but I was a little surprised that no play food was included. Luckily, my wife purchased some over a year ago from a KB Toys store that was closing up, and she held on them until she needed it. She’s good like that. Soon we’ll have to introduce the kids to diner lingo. That should be fun.