My Little Pizza Maker

Just last week, Little Haven Learning Center - where my daughter is attending pre-school, had this great activity for their Nutrition Month theme this July. This was a "Pizza-making Camp" as my daughter named it.

Their entire Kindergarten class went to Greenwich and had a chance to make their own pizza. I got to learn a little something too. Here's how it went:



First of all you dress up. Here's my daughter, Andrea, in her apron and hairnet getting ready to make her pizza.






After which you get all your ingredients ready. The pizza store basically provided her with the pizza dough, some tomato sauce, cheese and ham. She then starts to spread the tomato sauce on top of the dough.



When you're just about done with that, then you sprinkle grated cheese and then top it off with ham. I didn't get a picture of the latter as she was going way too fast for my documentation purposes.



Anyway the end product should look something like this. At this point, the pizza is ready to go into the oven.





The entire activity took about 4 hours and cost me a hundred pesos. But it was quite worth it. My daughter got to make her own pizza and eat it too - so it was pretty good. She also got her "Pizza maker certificate." Not sure what that means really, but she had a good time and that's what matters.




That's the end of my little pizza maker's story.

Who's listening?

People hardly ever listen. We don't hear what we don't want to hear - which are ironically the things we need to hear. I guess that's why advice is so easily given and not taken, or maybe why nagging irritates people so much.

"We have 2 ears and 1 mouth that we may listen twice as much as we talk," I think that was how the saying went. What a tired line that must be. We usually turn a deaf ear to the unpleasant sounds of life anyway - relationship problems, work deadlines and sometimes even our own physical pain (if I can tolerate it, I'd rather not go to the dentist).

Along the process though, we betray ourselves the most. Sometimes we can be so tactless and yet we resent people who are; we comfort and try to appease the people we care about when they are sad while we ourselves are so difficult to talk to when we are not in the mood; we share our musings and yet we forget them when we are discouraged; we get angry and end up saying things we don't even mean. Then when everything comes apart at the seams, we wonder what happened.

Maybe because people hardly ever listen. And the person we listen to the least would be... ourselves.