Toy Kitchen

Remember that crazy toy kitchen that took George almost a year to build for Kayla and Jocelyn?

    


The man learned CIRCUITRY, for goodness’ sake! Not even my brother, who is getting his Masters of Engineering at an elite Ivy League university, knew how to wire a potentiometer, op-amp chip and an inverter chip 555-chip¹ in order to get the LEDs to light up brighter when the stove knobs were turned. (Although I like to think that I probably could’ve figured it out that one semester in college that I took an electronics class. I probably could’ve even soldered it neatly onto a circuit board, too. But those days are ancient history, especially with my Swiss cheese memory these days.)²

While the girls LOVE playing with the kitchen (okay, Jocelyn “plays” by flinging the cabinet doors open and emptying the contents onto the floor), apparently it doesn’t take much to satisfy the imagination of a little girl. In fact, a plain old $20 IKEA wooden step stool works just fine.



Wish I had known that earlier.

¹I stand corrected. George ended up using a 555-chip to get the LEDs to brighten when the knob is turned. But I swear, he had all those other chips I listed too, and probably more. We had Radio Shack boxes waiting on our front step practically every afternoon for a month while he figured the circuit out.

²The physics class did come in handy though, to identify the colored bands on the resistors that were part of the circuit. George couldn’t tell the difference between brown and purple, orange and red… See? I helped too!