It's Christmas time, it's cold, everyone is baking. A lot of cookies are being made, sugar cookie decorating with the kiddos, tins of cookies are being put together for neighbors and friends.
Last night, I decorated cookies with my kids. It made me want to scream. Seriously, I think I did scream a few times. First I let them cut the cookies out of the dough, big mistake, big, HUGE! All I did was swat hands away from the excess dough. Mostly Madi's hands. She's got quick paws. How much raw dough they actually ate, I don't know.
Three batches went in the oven.
Three batches came out of the oven.
Three batches got decorated.
It started off okay, I was excited, they were excited...some of us did it as super heroes.
They picked out which cookies cutters they wanted to use.
Snuck some dough.
When we finally got done with the madness of cutting out the cookies, we made different colored frosting. Each bowl of frosting had it's own 2 spreaders. Silly me thought those spreaders would stay in their assigned bowls as to not mix the colors. Hahaha, so naive I am...so naive.
It was time to decorate. We took it seriously at first. I thought Madi was going to decorate a few the way she jumped right in there and started icing her cookie.
Riley was doing pretty good too, she's had a lot of practice at preschool though.
And then it happened. Three minutes in, I yelled at them both for licking the spreaders and putting them back in the bowls....for playing in the sprinkles....for biting every cookie that came their way...for mixing the spreaders...for frosting their hands instead of the cookies...it always ends up like this.
I know what you are thinking to yourselves, "they are just babies", "they don't know any better", "one day Kristi will laugh about this", "they even look cute when they cry"
These are all valid points. But, it drove me crazy. Four hands going every which way can drive a person mad. Mad I tell you! You know how I decorate cookies? Nicely, without a mess, with nice music on.
I don't dump all the sprinkles in the middle of the cookie. I don't lick my spreaders and decorate the next cookie with a saliva filled/dripping knife. I just don't. That's gross.
I wouldn't have this problem I don't think if I wasn't a perfectionist. I also wouldn't have this problem if I waited until my kids were old enough to actually decorate the cookies. You know, like 16 and 14. Just kidding, like 18 and 16, just kidding again, you know, like never?
You know I'm joking right? I hope so. But it still bothers me when it doesn't go as smoothly as it does in my head. I know they are kids, I know they just want to eat all the goodies I put in front of them, but it always ends up like this...
With the green spreader in the red bowl, and the red spreader in the white bowl, and...
and fallen sprinkles everywhere, over here, over there, down the hall, down the pants, in the ears...
and faces full of frosting of every color...even though the only cookie she was allowed to eat was frosted in green.
and hands that could destroy my sofa in 1.25 seconds if I turn my back.
But, after it's all said and done, and we have a nice plate of beautifully decorated cookies,
I'm always happy that we did it. And more importantly, so are they...
even if some cookies look like this...
and the kids are so gross and sticky that I have to do this...
and it's such a stressful experience, that I need one of these...
Tis the Season!
Anyone insterested in eating some of these yummy cookies? Let me know, we have 3 batches, and not all of them are filled with saliva...all though I didn't seperate them, and it will be a guessing game.
