I was sitting in Emma's 5th grade classroom making tiny pies with 10 year olds. There was alot of flour being thrown around, but mostly the kids were excited to do anything other than math, so my corner of the room was the fun corner.
It's hard to cook with a crowd of kids around, and everything gets done kind of badly, like you get one good pie, one kind of terrible one because you only have one set of eyes, and there are lots of hands and kids who want to taste stuff and stir stuff and you start feeling a little bit panicked because you do only have the one person - yourself - I don't know how teachers do it, except to give in to chaos, or use a whistle.
But our pies got made, and the kids were helping bring the other kids up so they all got a turn, and some girl whose name I don't know was flattening out her dough and she said "I love your Mom, Emma."
In the middle of all that chaos, there it was. My paycheck.
It is worth it, to make memories and bake things before they grow up. To try and stall time and leap into that chaos.
You're also going to be making sandwiches until you die.