The Small Person has been asking me to come and help at her nursery one day, so I figured that going along one Monday morning to ‘help 6 children do some cooking’ would be fairly painless … how wrong I was…
I get there and a very nice teacher shows me where all the cooking things are and finds me ‘an easy recipe to get you started’, and explains that they choose 6 different children each week to make cakes or biscuits, so far so good. So we go back over to the nursery to collect 6 children and bring them over to the canteen. Then the teacher hands me a card, with 6 names written on it and says’
‘just bring them back to the nursery when you are finished’
Aaaaaaaa.. how could they leave me?! The small people look at me expectantly and I figure it isn’t going to do me any good to run after the teacher and cling to her legs in an attempt to make her stay.
So I put aprons on small people, and get them to wash their hands. I then run around after the now soaking wet small people in an attempt to round them up and dry them off. I give each pair of small people a bowl and a spatula and, in the time it took me to turn round and pick up the margerine, a spatula fight breaks out. I figure I can distract them with weighing stuff, and go into comedy pantomime routine of,
‘Is it balancing yet?’
The small people look at me stony faced.
‘Ooookay, let’s mix stuff’ they seem to like this bit, so I get the trays ready to put the biscuits on, and turn round just in time to see one small person remove his finger from his nose, stick it in the mixture and then into his mouth. Nice.
So, we splodge bits of mixture out of the bowl onto the trays, and into hair, ears, up noses, onto the floor… I desperately try to resurrect the greasy, slimy, small person handled material into something resembling biscuits. I then have to present these items to the school cook in order that they can be baked, so my troupe of small people and I all go to the kitchen door and hand over the trays of squidge, the school cook looks at the trays, looks at the grubby small people, looks at me and says,
‘Well, they aren’t the worst I’ve seen’
Major respect for nursery school teachers, I have no idea how or why they do this every day.