This is a Daily Moment—short perspectives on life and times through a dad’s eye.
How often are your pancakes round? If you said always, I’m sorry.
Yes, it’s true that when you pour the batter straight into the pan, it expands outward in a round shape. But when you pour the batter in the shape of a lightning bolt, you get a pancake shaped like a lightning bolt.
My kids love funky shaped pancakes, and I’m sure yours will too.
So here are some other options: Make the initials of the people’s names who are going to eat them—a big M for Mary, a big L for Larry. Make spirals and squares. Put two little circles on a big circle to make a Mickey mouse face. Make the number of your kid’s birthday.
Round pancakes are boring. We eat them round because that’s how people always make pancakes. But it’s not the only way to do.
So much of life works like this. We do things out of habit—because that’s how we learned it, or that’s how people around us do it. Sometimes these little automatic heuristics are useful for saving time and energy. But so often we don’t even realize we’re an autopilot.
So make a square pancake, get off the beaten path, turn left instead of right.
It can spark creativity. And it makes life, and pancake eating, a little more interesting.
→ Here’s another fun idea to spark kids’ creativity, starting with apples.
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