Reviewing my parenting ideas and adding 4-H Cloverbuds.

I often reflect on our parenting strategies, reviewing any major life altering mistakes we have made and then looking into the future and visualizing where we need to end up.  Jacie is 8 now and I believe we need to be focusing on life skills.
She is becoming an outstanding reader and I am happy after doing an extra workbook on her own over Christmas Break in the area of math she is doing much better in the math department. I also send thanks to my friend Barb and her introduction of the Stack the States game on the IPAD, Jacie now knows all the 50 states and several facts about each.
However we have some work to do in the area of life skills.  With all of the mandatory testing we cannot expect teachers to teach these skills.  I really don't think politicians will ever consider basic life skills important enough to put on a test.  They think we all eat out, have housekeepers and people who change our oil.  I don't know who they think will do this for them, if no one is trained.  At any rate we are beginning the 4-H Cloverbud program this summer.  Jacie is taking the Road to Cooking Project.  We had an old book, which I believe will be very similar to this years so this weekend we did lesson one in the old book.  The first lesson includes a scavenger hunt for different cooking equipment in your very own kitchen.  It also includes cleaning celery, cutting celery and putting peanut butter in the celery with raisins on top. With the help of only her sister, this became an hour long activity, that was all fun.  Ok there was a little squealing over putting the peanut butter in the celery as it ended up on her fingers and did not look as neat as she had hoped.