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Jeannette Walls Cooking

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When I read Jeannette Walls’ literature regarding her cooking at such a young age, I was appalled. She was the age of three and cooking with open flames. She could feel the heat rising from the boiling water which engulfed her hot dogs. While she was cooking, she could smell the boiling water that surrounded the hot dogs flaring up. She sensed the abnormally hot air in her nose as she breathed in the warmness. Personally, I can’t imagine being only three years old and cooking. First of all, why is she cooking while her parents aren’t watching? “I could hear Mom in the next room singing while she worked on one of her paintings” (Walls 5). Her mother is paying no attention to her three-year-old daughter cooking. It’s absurd to think about it. …show more content…

She must have also been in charge of walking the dog down the streets alone, or maybe in charge of lighting bonfires. The responsibilities of this three-year-old are unheard of compared to today’s standards for raising a child. I would never, under any circumstances, let my three-year-old daughter use a stove. A big reason for this is evident when the author says, “I was still standing on the chair, swatting at the fire with the fork I had been using to stir the hot dogs” (Walls 5). First of all, she was not taught the proper way to fight a fire. Instead of the “stop drop and roll” method we were all taught, she swats at the fire with a fork in panic. By swatting at the fire, she hoped the fork would damage the entity that surrounded her and put an end to the pain. She was feeling the moisture from her skin being drawn out from her. She smelt her dress being burned right off her as well as the fire on her bare skin bubbling up and filling the room. In her head, she could hear the screams she wanted to say immediately, but did not have the words ready. At the time, she could taste her saliva building up tremendously as the fire retained its fearsome

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