Eiche fam

In an effort to enable Namine a little more in the kitchen, we invested in a Brita water filter. But we’re not using it for water. We’re using it for milk.

Weekend mornings are difficult for Namine. She prefers to get up at unholy hours, and we like to sleep in. She can’t reach any of the breakfast fixins, with the cereal being in the top cabinet and the milk being in cartons she can’t easily lift on the top shelf of the fridge where she can’t reach. We meant to change that today.

We have two cabinets where we keep the tea and breakfast stuff. They’re storebought things, one sitting on top of the other. Switching the contents so that the cereal and granola bars were on the bottom and tea on top was easy enough. But what to do about the milk?

Jessica had the idea of putting the milk into a dispenser. And even better, we already had one. It was nice to have around for family and friend gatherings, but we didn’t use it regularly. Unfortunately, it had a metal spigot. Soy milk — which is what Namine drinks more than cow milk — isn’t as acidic as its bovine equivalent, but we still preferred to have something with plastic instead.

We couldn’t find anything equivalent to what we already had, sans metal spigot, at the store. The closest thing we could find was a Brita dispenser. With the filter removed, we thought it would be perfect. We were right.

The dispenser didn’t fit on the bottom shelf of the fridge. If Namine couldn’t reach it on the next shelf up, we’d had to rearrange the shelves, but as it turned out, she could. She was quite enthusiastic about being able to pour herself a glass of milk all by herself.

Life is harder when your reach is confined to two and a half feet from the floor. There is much that Namine can’t do on her own yet, much to her frustration. “It’s not fair!” is something we hear a lot lately, and while we can sympathize, it seems like a lot of the time that’s all we can do. But we try as much as we can to enable her — not just in encouraging her to do things more on her own, like climbing into her chair in the dining room for meals, but also to change the apartment’s configuration to suit her better.