Forget Barbie and toy trains, buy new kitchen gadgets instead

Like me, you may have thought that kitchen colanders were just for draining pasta and rinsing produce and that a stock pot’s sole purpose was, well, making stock or cooking pasta.

How wrong we were!

Small, hand-held colanders are the perfect toddler-sized face masks. And the bigger ones? Like the one Addy is sitting on? Those make ideal chairs for tiny butts.

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Clearly, the more colanders you can put on your face or butt, the better!

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When the new toy, Colander, gets old, the next best thing is a big metal pot, which my daughter pulled out of the cabinet and, all by herself, climbed right into as if she had done it a million times before. Probably because she actually has done this a million times before.

Of course, it only gets better when Grandpa picks her up in the pot and carries her around the house, offering people a bite of Adeline Soup.
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WARNING: The only way to extract a small child from the aforementioned pot or colanders is to parade large farm equipment in front of them. Luckily, the farmer who rents my parents’ land showed up just in the nick of time to plant corn. To some little girls, namely my own, tractors are more magical than puppies.

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