My children, the entrepreneurs

Back in 2006, I wrote this article for the Boston Globe, about the tweens and young teens who were using Carlisle’s new Farmers Market to develop their entrepreneurial skills. As so often happens when I work on a feature story, I became enchanted with my subjects and developed great admiration for these young entrepreneurs.

But, with the typical nearsightedness of a parent, I couldn’t imagine my own children standing among their ranks. At ages three and seven that year, my kids’ only interest in our local Farmers Market was how many free samples of chocolate chip cookies they could cadge before I would notice, and how many dogs they could play with while I chatted with the other browsers.

It doesn’t seem as if four years have gone by, but Farmers Market starts up for the summer this weekend, and my kids are ready. Not to eat or play: to sell. They’ve been practicing their baking skills all week. Their product, they decided, would be banana bread. At the time they settled on this plan, they’d never made banana bread, but they knew it was a specialty of mine, one that they’d heard guests at our house and recipients of our gifts compliment many times. I agreed to help them get their baking abilities up and running.

They chose the business name themselves: Who’s On First. It was over a month ago that they selected the name and made a sign, using stencil letters they found at Staples. Earlier that week, Tim’s fifth grade teacher had played a You Tube clip of Abbott and Costello doing their best-known routine, and the class had been in stitches over it. I love the juxtaposition of old and new: the fact that with all the media currently available to them, nothing is funnier to the fifth graders than a 1940’s comedy routine – but also the fact that they’re all familiar with it now thanks to an innovation as state-of-the-art as YouTube.

I started teaching Tim and Holly, co-proprietors of Who’s On First, my method for making banana bread earlier this week. The first step, I reminded them, is always to wash hands. That part they had down pat. I explained the other steps and they discussed it for a while to determine how to best divide the labor. Because Holly is so much physically smaller and a bit less manually dexterous than Tim, it was fairly easy to decide who should do what. And calling Holly “less manually dexterous” is a euphemism of the first degree. Normally I just refer to her as “the Gravity Queen.” She’s never yet picked up an object she couldn’t manage to drop within moments. So I wasn’t too enthusiastic about her handling much of anything in the way of cooking ingredients, knowing whatever she touched, I would end up cleaning up off the kitchen floor.

I overcame that reservation early on, realizing that cleaning up was just going to have to be a big part of this endeavor for all three of us. And the kids settled into a routine as we practiced with one, then two, then eventually four batches of banana bread. Holly greases the pans while Tim peels the bananas. Tim melts the butter while Holly breaks the eggs into a bowl and beats them with a whisk. (To my surprise, the Gravity Queen isn’t bad with eggs. But I’m not letting her anywhere near the flour.) Tim mixes the dry ingredients while Holly beats together the bananas and sugar. When they’re done, I pour the batter into the pans for them and slide the whole set into the oven.

I’m looking forward to their first day of sales (or their IPO, as my husband calls it). They’ve worked hard together, and I’m hoping they get a gratifying response in the form of lots of customers. I’m also curious to see if they can maintain a regular baking schedule throughout the summer and not let the novelty wear off. If they can, they could each enjoy a satisfying amount of spending money over the next few months, and learn something about running a business and working together. If they can’t sustain their interest, we’ll eat the results of their initial efforts and try again another year.

But my fingers are crossed for a fine opening day on Saturday. Although I couldn’t have imagined it back when I was an objective on-the-scene reporter writing about other kids working as Farmers Market vendors, my children will now stand proudly among them. And I can’t wait to see how it goes for them.