Necessity
This one's for the parents doggy paddling in the deep end. Like or share if that's you.
Do you ever wait until the last minute to do things? I’m guilty of procrastinating on things that bring me zero joy. Calling insurance providers, doing anything with the IRS, and planning vacations (I like the vacation but hate the planning part) are just some of the things that cause me to drag my feet. I also don’t rush to do things that I know will be annoyingly painful to deal with—potty training was one of these things. I was always weighing whether I would be more inconvenienced by an extended run of diapering or devoting myself fully to a shorter, more concentrated period of time cleaning up accidents. The diapers won.
Image: Family picture at the Haiku competition where Nico won first place for the elementary school division
I realized last weekend as I was preparing to leave town for a conference, that I’ve also procrastinated on letting my kids grow up. And when I say this, I mean them doing things like cooking, cleaning, and grocery shopping. They do currently each have some chores—emptying and loading the dishwasher, feeding the cat, and doing a few loads of laundry. The latter tends to fall to the back burner because the people that clean our apartment each week do it when they come. 🫠 And, Nick and I cook all the meals and do all the grocery shopping. Meanwhile, it feels like we are our very capable and old enough children’s servants filling up water bottles and preparing snacks.
Teaching my children how to clean a toilet, sweep and mop a floor efficiently and quickly, do their laundry from wash to fold, and cook for themselves have all been chores that I have not done. The pain of teaching them and letting them fail to then learn how to do all of the above better, has fallen to the bottom of my list. And it’s not because I don’t know how important it is for them to have these skills; it’s because I know how much work it will be to teach them. But this weekend, as I thought about all the things that I needed to get done before I left town, I thought, “Why am I doing all of these things alone while these children sit on the couch and wait for food to be delivered to them?!” It was time for them to do some work to be the solution to their problems–they were hungry. Necessity became the catalyst for their growth and it was my kick in the pants to get going on teaching them some basic life skills, primarily how to feed themselves.
Image: Knicks-inspired dot cakes that we’re making in very limited qualities
Nick and I are in the heat of the season. The next two weeks are very packed with catering, busy stores, launching pints at a speciality grocer (to be announced soon), the start of a new partnership with the tapas concept Boqueria–they’ll be serving their Churros ice cream sandwich with our Ethiopian coffee with turmeric and honeycomb candies all summer, pivoting on menu planning to cater to our city’s collective desire for
Knicks-inspired food and content, and fielding everyone’s sudden interest in us running pop ice cream shops across the city with less than four weeks to figure everything out. Someone called me an octopus the other day and that’s exactly how I feel with my hands in lots of different things that need to get done.
The kids get out of school this week, which also means they will need to be managed and fed. Frankly, we don’t have the bandwidth to do more than dinner. Some people in our position may hire a temporary babysitter to take cover. But, finding the right person takes work and I can only devote my hiring energy to hiring new Scoopers because I thought we were well staffed until we realized last week that we definitely need more people on deck to help us get to the finish line of these new opportunities and existing needs. Others may have spent time planning for this rush of activity by organizing play dates and cooking and freezing meals. These are also things I do not particularly enjoy. I was a good playdate planner when I had one child, but that desire and skill left me just a little bit more with each child that I had. In short, no play dates have been made and no meals have been prepped.
When Nick and I were talking about what we were going to do with the kids who are 13, 10, and 8, I said, “This just may be the summer where they grow up.” As restaurant children, our kids have lived a pretty sheltered life. They don’t live at the stores with us. They’re not working at the stores yet. And save the occasional argument about business decisions, they have been pretty shielded from the realities of what it takes to run a food business in this city. Some of this has been intentional and some of it has been convenient for us—it’s so much easier schlepping things around when you don’t have a toddler to schlep, too.
Image: Talk about schlepping. Ila asked Nick for a piggy back ride after Nico's Haiku reception. This lasted for 20 seconds.
But for the next couple of weeks, they nor we have the luxury of attending to their every need. They’re going to need to figure things out on their own and as a team. They’ll need to make breakfast and lunch together for each other. If we’ve run out of some food item, they’re going to need to go to the grocery store to get it. I have sent Ila and Zadie to the grocery store before to pick up a few things with a list so this isn’t so new. The difference here is that they will need to figure things out on their own and solve their problems. We began to model what this looked like on Saturday as I was packing for a 6:30am flight the next morning.
They were all hungry after coming home from a full day of activities. I was toggling between doing a load of laundry to have clean clothes for this trip because clearly no one had done the laundry yet, and dealing with the staff schedule for the store over the next couple of weeks. When they howled, “I’m hungry,” the light bulb went off and I thought, “Why am I the short order cook, too?” They needed to make their own food. So, I showed Ila how to make Basmati rice in the Instant Pot to go along with her chana masala from the night before. Zadie and Nico wanted taquitos and french fries. It wasn’t the most healthful but that’s what they wanted so I let them have it. Ila realized that she needed to get snacks for her meet the next day so she was grocery store bound while her rice was cooking. We all made a list of grocery items, which included taquitos.
When Ila came back with the bounty, I walked Zadie through how to read the directions on the packaging so that she could cook the taquitos. My instruction was more inquiry-based than didactic, which took a bit more time and required me to quell my inner frustration that this was all taking way too long, but through my questions, Zadie learned how to find the cooking instructions, set the oven and prepare her cookie sheet for all the frozen food she was about to make. In retrospect, Nico should have been standing there, too, so he could learn with her. But I was doggy paddling in an ocean at this point and didn’t have the forethought to make him listen to my lecture on heating up frozen food. This was a fail on my end because what I definitely don’t want to teach is that his sisters make all of his food while he sits on the couch, but baby steps.
Like with many delegation tasks, it’s hard to release the responsibility in the beginning because of the training that goes into preparing someone to own the task. But once they learned, I regained a few more minutes and hours of my future days.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and because we’re out of additional hours in the day and adults in our home, these children are going to level up their ability to do things for themselves this summer. I could have prepared for this moment over the winter, but didn’t I start this by saying that I procrastinate on things I don’t enjoy? I didn’t enjoy explaining to Ila how we wash rice before we cook it nor did I have the patience to explain why we add a little less than a one to one ratio of water to said washed rice before hitting “Rice” on the Instant Pot, but I did and she did the steps on her own, so she knows. Once everyone was settled with their food, I felt a little relieved that they now know how to do something new that does not require one of my tentacles. And when I returned to packing and my computer, my tentacles had one less thing to do.
Petrushka
Your Local Ice Cream Lady & Life/Business Coach