In our small garden

A Tale of Two Play Kitchens – WIP Wednesday

I’ve pretty much embraced my toy minimalism, but there is one big-ticket item that I feel is missing in our home: a play kitchen. Last winter I got Ash a set of dishes and some play food, which he occasionally plays with with gusto, and then puts away and forgets about for a month. So I’ve been putting off investing in a good play kitchen. Then I came upon the perfect solution: a brilliant and thrifty DIY cardboard play kitchen design by Anna Wulick of forty-two roads. This pattern requires collecting a lot of large pieces of cardboard, which I’ve been slowly doing, though I may not have enough yet. It also requires a large cement surface, like a patio, to lay the cardboard on in order to cut it out (with an implement I refer to as a Japanese knife but which, to my husband’s disappointment, is not actually a ninja weapon but merely Israeli for box cutter). My goal for this week is to finally get out all the cardboard pieces on my newly-cleaned up patio, mark the pattern pieces on them, and cut them out.

While we’re in the business of making the play kitchen, I figure we should also set up a mud kitchen, which is at the top of my summer fun list. I’m not sure what we can use as the base for the mud kitchen, but it may well be lurking in our storage closet behind all the cardboard pieces I’ve stacked in there for the indoor play kitchen. I’m going to use the mud kitchen as an excuse to rid my kitchen of stuff I should really toss, like old nonstick pans and way expired spices. (I am okay with the newer nonstick I already own for limited low-heat use, but I don’t plan to buy any more for health reasons.) We may have to round out our mud kitchen with a few items from the dollar store, but I’m hoping we can repurpose all of its components from home. After nearly four years of obliviousness to birthdays, Ash is in full-on birthday appreciation mode and I think he’ll love “baking” mud birthday cakes. All right, I’ll admit it, I kind of like playing with mud too. Still.