My three kids had stopped playing with their play kitchen, but I couldn't let go of it. We decided to declutter and built them an art table instead.
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When my oldest was just a toddler, we lived in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. We had optimized every corner of the apartment so we could store all his stuff, like diapers and a stroller, but there was no room for a play kitchen.
Every time we visited friends with a little play kitchen, he would spend hours playing there by himself. It made me sad we couldn't give him what he wanted, so when we moved to Maine to a bigger place, it was one of the first things I bought.
Moving states with three kids under the age of 3 was not easy. My husband and I would stay up late after putting the kids down to unpack boxes and get everything as ready as we possibly could.
One of the first things I had my husband install was the play kitchen. It came with a little food market and a cart. That first Christmas in the house, my parents gifted our kids a bunch of little wooden fruits and vegetables.
All three of them spent hours playing with it. They would make me "salads" from their wooden veggies, practice their knife skills, cut the velcro slices with a wooden knife, and just play independently.
As they grew older, they paid less attention to the kitchen. But every time we talked about removing it and donating it, tears came flooding from their eyes. I felt bad, so the kitchen stayed.
When they did play with it, I resented how much cleanup I had to do after. There would be wooden slices of carrots and cucumbers all over our adult kitchen floor. Pieces were always missing. One of the doors had been accidentally broken, and we never repaired it. To me, it felt like clutter, but I didn't want to take the magic of imaginary play away from them.
We also added an art table next to the kitchen because our kids love to spend time painting and coloring. They had been paying way more attention to the table — that only fit one kid at a time — than the kitchen.
Lately, I kept telling my husband we needed to pull the bandaid off and get rid of the kitchen. We had delayed doing the same with our oldest's crib, which sat in his room filled with stuffies while he slept in a big kid bed next to it. We were afraid that if we took out the crib, he would have tons of big feelings about it. But one day, while he was at school, we decided to do it without consulting him; when he came home, his reaction was, "Now I can build legos in this space," and he moved on with his day.
So off I sent my husband to buy supplies to make a bigger art table for the empty space the kitchen would leave. We figured they wouldn't be so frazzled about losing it if we gave them something that replaced that beloved toy.
Courtesy of the author
Once the kitchen and all its little pieces were gone, our kitchen looked much more organized and less chaotic. It made me wonder why we had waited so long to do this.
Then, my husband proceeded to build the most beautiful hanging desk for the kids to do art on. We added our Lalo table and chairs to it for extra space and to potentially have the kids eat dinner there when they have friends over since we can't all fit at the table.
When the kids got home, they ran to their new art table and spent hours coloring, never once asking about the disappearance of their play kitchen. And in case you are wondering where it actually went, we moved it to our backyard and turned it into a mud kitchen in case they still want to cook me an inedible meal from time to time.
