Sammy is thinking ahead to his birthday

Out of the blue today, Sam told me today he wants a play kitchen for his birthday so he can make pretend food. He'll be five. He's already doing all sorts of things in a real kitchen so I wonder if he'd lose interest immediately if we went ahead and got him a toy kitchen set up. They're also very large and I don't want to find a place for something that size.



I decided to do a little research on the subject and it's amazing what's out there. How about this little gem for only $700? It's adorable but just a tad expensive, eh?

The Rolls Royce of toy kitchens?



There is the $400 frilly PBK kitchen. Yeah, I really don't see that either.




Moving down in price a bit, there is the KidKraft one for only $380.















I like this Back to Basics wooden kitchen but it's still $250 which really seems like a lot for something he'd likely use for a couple of days. (He was looking over my shoulder and spotted this one and said "That's what I want!"*)

I could pretend to misunderstand entirely and get him this dollhouse sized kitchen for about $20.

But I think my strategy will be to find a couple of large cardboard boxes and Sam and I will do a project where we build a nice little kitchen ourselves at some point in the near future. A recyclable kitchen, how efficient. I guess I'm not the first to think of it. I suspect that if we do that he'll be helping so it'll be, er, highly personalized.

*Of course he specified that it also has to have pretend food and pretend dishes.