Business

We are a family of entrepreneurs. It is how we make a living and still get to LIVE! In the past, Scott has both sold and bartered with the bread he has baked from our wood-fired oven. I mentioned to Evie that she was free to sell her cakes (limited distribution due to licensing etc.) She took our grocery receipts from this week and made a table of how much all her ingredients cost per unit of use (i.e. 1 cup of sugar, Tbsp. of butter etc.) Then she and I worked through about 8 recipes of me reading the recipe and her figuring out the cost per ingredient and totaling them up. Turns out Scott was doing the EXACT same thing for some stilts he is building (anyone need stilts? He has really excellent jigs he made so production is much easier now.)

I was blown-away by Evie's arithmetic skills. I explained the concept of rounding in money, she really didn't get it and I could tell it was because of my explanation. So I tried a new way of explaining it and she got it immediately. It was a good exercise for me. She is so adept with fractions and percentages, she can calculate 75% of 1 1/2 much faster than I can. She used the calculator a lot too, a new skill for her. It was neat to see how she had to think out the order of her calculations in order to use the calculator efficiently.

So, my eight year old will have made over $70 his month from her pet sitting business (keep in mind she only charges $2 a visit) and now she is thinking about selling cakes--maybe we can retire to Canada early!

Costing stilts.

Costing cakes.

Frosting cakes.

Cake #5 for 2009, Buttermilk Layer cake with Fudge frosting.

Who eats all these cakes? We usually have a slice of two and then make sure we see friends!