Kitchen

For this week's Foreign Service Blog Round-Up, the assignment is kitchens. And since I'm nosy and want to see everyone else's kitchens, I'm posting about mine too.
This is the cleanest kitchen I've ever had, thanks not to me but to our Ayi, or housekeeper. She keeps the place livable and sanitary. With two tiny kids, I'm not sure what I'd do without her. Well actually, I know what my house would look like without her, and I'm very grateful to have her help.

This is my grey kitchen. My favorite feature is the toddler-sized oven. It comes up to knee height, and the control knobs are placed just perfectly for small children to handle. Thankfully, Penny knows it's 'hot' and hasn't played with it... much... yet. It's tiny and only has room to hold a 9x13 pan. So instead of making cookies, I've made bar cookies. It's so much faster, I think I may do this in the future, even with a bigger oven.

You might notice that the stove has no control knobs. It took me two days to figure out how to use the darn thing ("Why didn't you just ask someone?" my Ayi suggested. I'm stubborn, that's why!) I've figured it out now, and it's quite nice.

We bought some little Ikea shelflets to help store some stuff that didn't fit into the cupboards. I would love to have a pantry, but we're making due with the shelving we do have.

And this is as clean as my kitchen gets. Our Ayi was here today, and I spent 10 minutes cleaning up before taking these pictures-- something I realize I should do more often but don't. And it's still not pristine.

We have a pitcher of water on the counter, which is from our distiller machine (in the laundry room). When I first moved in, the distiller was on full-blast boiling mode. I was horrified that I had a boiling water machine just the right height to boil my children when they played with it. But then once the jet-lag wore off, I realized that distilled water is cooled. And clean. Yay for distilled water!

Yes, I made that rug.

We have a dishwasher. We also have an Ayi. We store our Tupperware in the dishwasher.

This is Penny's table. I sit on the rocking chair usually, and Penny sits on one of the stools. I was going to buy a cute new table at Ikea, but when our stuff arrived, this table fit our needs just perfectly. Penny loves the handles on the little stools, and she goes through phases where she drags them around the apartment wherever she goes.