Kidzilla in the Kitchen

“Mamma, I want to help you cook.”

At dinnertime on Monday night, Kidzilla was in the kitchen and ready to go to work.  She pulled her chair over to the counter, climbed up, looked me in the eye and said,

“So.  What are we making?”

I cracked up and cried all in the same moment.

Kidzilla is funny.  Really funny.  (I have a good one waiting for Friday’s Favorites already.)  But when did My Girl get to be such a Big Girl?

“Mom!  Can we please start making dinner?”

Right.  Dinner.  I wiped my Mommy Tears away and pulled out the bag of red quinoa.

“Quinoa???  I looooove quinoa!”

And I love it that my Kidzilla loves quinoa… and that she knows what quinoa is.  I think I only learned about a year ago.  She’s way ahead of the curve.

And so we cooked.  Together.  Zilla and Mamma.

It’s not that it was anything new; we do this all the time, My Girl and I.  But it seemed new somehow.  I can’t explain exactly how or why…I wish I could.

Or maybe I don’t.  Maybe I just want to take the imprint of that cooking session and burn it in my heart forever, beside so many other moments like this one.  Ordinary moments, really…but extraordinary in their effect.

It isn’t important what we cooked or how it tasted.  That meal could have been cat food and it would have tasted like Ambrosia.  Now that I think about it…maybe it did.  What matters is that we had fun together.  She sprinkled and poured and tasted and learned how to use the pepper grinder.  She rinsed the beans and learned why to do so.  She listened to the quinoa pop like tiny kernels of popcorn as we toasted them.  She wanted to stir, but knows that some things—like hot stoves—are best left for the Mamma to handle.  For now.

“Mamma,” she said.  “I want to be you when I grow up.”

I’m pretty sure that was about wanting to be the one to stir the quinoa in the hot pot…

…but maybe not.

Either way is fine by me.