little hands crack nuts

It’s simple.

A bag of mixed nuts.  A nut cracker.  And an eager child.  Or two, in my case, that look alike.

The whole process for a 3-4 year old is so fascinating.

First there’s the sorting.  Each variety of nut gets its own bowl.

Then there’s the choosing and identifying of the nut.  Annabelle stuck with almonds and Ainsleigh wanted to try them all.

And then there’s the cracking of the nut.  Some nuts are easier to crack by little hands than others.  Hazelnuts and pecans are slippery when trying to grasp them in the nut cracker.

My girls absolutely loved the task of cracking the nut, pulling out the nut, and sampling it.  They felt so big completing the whole process (almost) all by themselves.  I decided that this would be a winter tradition because it was so thrilling for us all.

Annabelle and Ainsleigh have already begun the talk of their upcoming birthday.  I know, their birthdays aren’t until the end of April, but that doesn’t matter to them.  It is one of the few things they own all by themselves that they don’t have to share.  It is one of the times its all about them.

They never talk about what they want either.  It is always about the cake.  The cake is what they will talk about to us and perfect strangers until April.  (And my cakes–2012, 2011, were never really that special–they are just so thrilled to have their own.)

This year, the talk is all about wanting rainbow cakes.  Rainbow this and rainbow that.  Their favorite color?  ”Rainbow colors”, they’d say.

Rainbow it is–not until April.

the sleepy time gal