Little Kitchen Academy: Building Children’s Confidence Story by Felicity Curin
Photos by Sandra Steier & submitted
My story is long. But I look at it like a collection of ingredients, cultivated and harvested when the time was right to create the ultimate recipe.
daughters, different events in our lives prompted me to wonder why we had to sneak healthy choices into our kids. Why couldn’t nutritious food be desirable too?
Little Kitchen Academy didn’t start out as Little Kitchen Academy, it was a dream called “Sweet Maddies.” A beautiful, child-centered bakery. It was filled with brightly coloured creative treats displayed at child’s-eye level and sneakily made with healthy fruits and vegetables. It was named after my mum, whose immeasurable love for children was passed on to me. I knew the location, I smelled the aroma, I saw the children empowered to make choices on their own. I saw parents pleased because their children were eating veggies and not knowing it!
I look to my past and start collecting.
And as this dream sat on the sidelines while my husband and I raised our three 26
I grew up in Dunbar, racing my brother and sister up 29th Avenue to Ling’s Market (now Starbucks) with 75 cents to spend on candy, yes, 75 cents would get a whole bag! Tossing our bikes against the motorcycle repair shop-turned Sodas-turned The Dunbar, we’d go in and find our favourite sugary treat. Shopping for special outfits at The Peppermint Tree (now Stong’s), going back and forth with a soccer ball in Dunbar Park as a “Dunbar Coolcat,” and always running into our teachers from ICS and my brother’s teachers from St. George’s. Dunbar was our ‘hood.’
June 15 - August 31, 2019
DunbarLife.com
