My kitchen elf

Teagan usually falls apart around dinner prep time.  Piper too, for that matter.  It's just a simple matter of math that it takes two hands to put dinner on the table, and that leaves no hands left over to hold, calm, and otherwise attend to a needy child.  (After dinner, everything changes and you can't catch one of those buggers to save your life they're running away from you so fast!)

Anyway, my latest trick is to push a chair over to the counter and let Teagan be involved in the dinner preparations.  Mostly, she plays with things in the dish rack and asks for refills on her servings of "peaches" (peas).  Kid otherwise won't eat peas, but put her on a chair and put those peas in a bowl at counter height and suddenly they're magic in her mouth.

This whole arrangement has made dinner prep so much more manageable!  Except that Teagan has just started to experiment with some climbing (from the chair onto the counter, back down to the chair again, off the chair onto the floor with one hand ("Wah chiz mommy!").   She's impressively agile, but alas, gravity has a way of besting even the most adept of children in the end.  So her days on the chair by the counter may be numbered...  For today, though, we had an evening free of meltdowns!