The story

The idea for La Dînette (play kitchen in my native language, French) came out of two realizations. As a mother of two young children (with a fulltime job), I felt I was wearing multiple hats at once. I wanted to dedicate uninterrupted time to my children and be “a good mother”, strive at my job, while also making sure I was not losing myself as a person. Despite my love of cooking, weeknight meals had become a total dull, no-creativity moment, where my partner and I scrambled together food to feed our kids. A rotation of pasta and cheese made me feel guilty and stressed for their health. Asking for takeout too often was too expensive, restaurant food too fancy and the amount of packaging made the environmentally-conscious citizen in me feel guilty. 

• The first realization was that I clearly could not do it all without losing my sanity.

• The second realization - after talking about it with a couple of my friends - was that I was not alone in feeling it.

In short, cooking dinner had become solely a chore, and made us resent the time and (mental) effort we had to put into it. 
I decided to do something about that frustration and created La Dinette.