How It All Began

Nothing prepared me for life as a mom.

You would think being an accomplished classroom educator for over a decade for everything from preschoolers to middle schoolers might make you feel ready...but apparently not.

When my boy/girl twins arrived, I realized no amount of training was going to make me feel like I was doing *enough* for my kids. Maybe that’s just parenthood? To always worry you’re doing enough to support your children?

My twins are completely different. Different interests, different personalities, and they’re developing differently. And I wanted to do right by them. I wanted to be sure I was taking what I knew about child development, what I knew from teaching, what I knew from my collaboration with my son’s special education team, and what I knew intuitively as a mom, and giving them every opportunity to learn and grow at the pace they need.

As we spent a lot of time at home through cold Nebraska winters and through the pandemic, I realized that there was one place my kids always wanted to “help” - the kitchen. We’ve spent hours cooking and baking - because they LOVE it. And who doesn’t love tasty food? It’s naturally a delicious (and incredible sensory) experience! No matter how different my little ones are, we can always agree to have a good time cooking together.

But as I went to try to grow this love of cooking, I realized I couldn’t find the types of cookbooks I was wanting for them.

I wanted something for young children, but everything was geared at older kids or was so text-heavy that my kids couldn’t own the process of “reading” a recipe. So I set out to make them visual recipes with simple sentence structures so that they could “read” the recipe with some independence while building early literacy and math skills.

I wanted simple ingredients, but many recipes I was finding required too much forethought! When my kids got excited to bake, I didn’t want to have to load them up to go to the grocery store before we could get started because it required obscure ingredients. I also didn’t want to have to gather twenty ingredients first, because kids can cause a lot of chaos in the time it takes to gather that many things! So I set out to create recipes with six ingredients or less - all of which are likely in your pantry already.

I also wanted to feel good about how I was using my time with them in the kitchen. As a teacher, we write lesson plans for a reason - it helps us create clear goals for our students and design a path to support students in reaching that goal. I wanted to support my own children in the same way. But always feeling like I had twinadoes running around, designing elaborate lessons to feel like I was supporting their early education and development at home sounded about impossible. So I wanted to design simple, no-prep (because who has the time?!) ways to integrate some of their learning goals into the fun time we were already having together in the kitchen.

These recipes and cookbooks are simply a product of what I wanted for my own children and wasn’t able to find. Visual recipes to help them gain confidence in the kitchen while giving me quick ideas for ways I can support their learning too.

I hope you and your family are able to use and enjoy them just as much as we have!