Cooking Capabilities

Teddy has an interesting relationship with the kitchen. He believes the kitchen sink is his personal waterpark, which often results in some disagreements when the waterpark is closed because I need to actually do the dishes or don't care to clean up after he wanders away from the wave pool.

He can reach our knife block and knows how to open the hideaway door to access it. Most of the time he leaves it alone, but occasionally try to grab a knife and run away because he knows he's not supposed to have a knife. That's always fun to try to safely recover the knife while not cutting either of us. Knock on wood, so far we've been successful.

If food is on the stove, it's likely he'll try to stir it with no concept that pans are hot or recognition when he burns himself. We always try to keep the stirring tools further away because he gravitates to utensils like there's a magnetic draw. He's also been known to use spatulas, giant stirring spoons and various other utensils to eat his food. It's apparently more fun that way ... coming from the child who feels a fork is necessary for graham crackers. He's civilized like that and likes to use utensils. 

When he's protesting that we're starving him, he'll self-serve from the refrigerator or cupboards if we leave them unlocked. Most often, he grabs frozen waffles or pancakes, but he tried to sneak by Dave with a drumstick for breakfast the other day. Not a bad breakfast choice, in my opinion. When that is locked and we're cooking food in the oven, we tell him to check out the magic food box. He'll sit and stare inside the oven, asking repeatedly for what is cooking. He will pull out oven mitts, put them on his hands and wait for us to open the oven door. Yeah, that's not happening. Then he'll often put the oven mitts on us and direct us to the door. That's how we got the display of counting last week. 

We normally keep the oven locked because of Teddy's absolute disregard for safety. In fact, there's times that if we leave it unlocked that Teddy will actually direct us to lock the oven. It's like he sometimes knows he's not trustworthy. However, last week when I was unloading the dishwasher, Teddy determined that he was going to use the oven. Mind you, the oven was completely cool. He put on two hot pads and proceeded to open the oven. Then he managed to crawl on top of the top rack to wedge himself in the oven. I am quite certain that if I wouldn't have pulled him out, after snapping a picture, that he would have completely wedged himself in there and attempted to shut the door to boot.

Rump roast anyone?

I think he might need a few more cooking classes, but this picture cracks me up. We intentionally buy appliances that are least likely to be broken by Teddy, things we can lock, knobs that won't break off or aren't easy to turn. We know they'll be broken eventually because Teddy's a destructive force of nature, but we always hope for a good long spell before repairs or replacements. In case you're wondering, our goal in life is just to keep Teddy alive. Hey, we've succeeded so far!