When Life Gives You Lemons.

In my last grocery order, I meant to order one lemon. Turns out, I ordered one BAG of lemons. Pretty different, ha! So when Eva asked to make lemonade on a random Tuesday afternoon, I was able to say YES!

She started by counting the lemons — she had 8. Then she sliced them in half (our favorite kid knives!), and used her hands to squeeze the juice into a bowl. This was the most time consuming part. We own a neat and tidy tool that would do this part for her, but I think it’s important to strengthen those fine motor skills. So, manual labor it was! 🙂

Once the lemons were sliced and squeezed, we moved to the stove. She used a cup of water and a cup of sugar to make her simple syrup. She gently stirred until the sugar dissolved and then we waited about 10 minutes for it to cool down a bit. Patience was not easy. Then she strained the pulp and seeds from the lemon juice.

The next step was combining together 5 cups of filtered water, the lemon juice and the simple syrup. I couldn’t take photos of this because I was supervising the pouring. She added all the ice in the freezer (which Sean noticed when he tried to make his next iced coffee), and gave the whole thing a few big stirs.

Lastly: the taste test!

She loved it and was so proud. She made sure to give both me and Sean a glass of her lemonade (it was delicious!) and shared some with Javi and Lola when they got home from school. She’s already planning to set up a lemonade stand this spring!

This was such an easy activity. It did seem intimidating but I’m so glad I said “yes” to her. We had a lot of fun together (with Walker, too, because he was asleep in the ergo the whole time) and the clean-up was super minimal. That’s my kind of afternoon treat!