Christmas Baking
Each year at the start of our Christmas preparations, I have lofty plans of baking a variety of cookies in time for the holidays and each year, I manage to bake one or two batches of cookies at most. This year though was going to be different! Ryan and I were going to bake each week as part of our home school curriculum. Wouldn’t it be fun?! Visions of Mom and son measuring, chatting, mixing, laughing, decorating, and tasting danced in my head. And then it arrived, the first day of baking. I thought we would make cut-out sugar cookies, or maybe gingerbread men… the boys wanted to make Moon rocks and Mars attack cookies from a recipe they found in a kids’ cookbook Dad and Ryan had picked up at the library. Well, at least the red Mars attack cookies looked festive! And so we began. I got out all of the ingredients; the boys were impatient, racing ahead in the recipe. I tried to point out the difference in the measurements; they bickered over who go to measure what. I encouraged them to work together; flour was flying out of the bowl as four hands tired to mix at once… it was bedlam; it was not fun…. And then the cookies were finished and the boys decided to decorate them with their astronaut figures and space shuttle toys, they were after all Moon rocks and Mars attack cookies, and here they began to work together: they were cooperative, they talked to each other, they complimented each other, and they even posed for a few pictures! Finally, it was tasting time… and nobody liked the cookies! Maybe next time, they’ll take my suggestions of sugar cookies or gingerbread men… if there is a next time; I’m still cleaning flour dust out of my rug!