The First Post

Well, here I am, doing what I have talked about for awhile. I am making a written record of all of the silly, crazy, frustrating and hilarious things that my daughter does. I will be honest, though; I am feeling a little bit of pressure with this being the first post and all. I have 9 years worth of material and don't quite know where to begin. I guess since it is the holiday season, I will begin with our latest Kaylea story.

You see, in our family, holiday cookie baking is a tradition. We make several different kinds of treats and prepare trays to go to Dad's office, to the neighbors and to the school. Well, the crowning jewels on the cookie trays have always been the hand decorated sugar cookies that have obviously been made with much love and given the utmost attention. Yesterday, Auntie M and I began the bake-a-thon and immediately Kaylea wanted to make her sugar cookies. I told her she would have to wait for a little while. After about the 50th time of her asking, we finally agreed to let her choose her cookie cutters and begin the process. Well, Auntie and I had already thought through this task at the grocery store, thus deciding to buy the sheets of cookie dough that merely get unrolled and cut. It sounded, to us, like the simplest way to approach this chore, since we would be preoccupied and wouldn't be able to stand over Kaylea to make sure things were done correctly. And after all, she is 9; how hard could it be to press a cookie cutter into cookie dough??? We let Kaylea and her cousin, Miss C, spread out on the dining room table, each armed with cookie cutters, their own sheet of sugar cookie dough and their own baking sheet (you know, we can't get their cookies mixed up). After awhile Miss C was through and had rejoined the fellas in the living room for the Christmas movie marathon, but Kaylea remained in the dining room working feverishly on her cookies. I didn't know what was taking her so long, but thought I would let her do it her way. I was feeling a bit of pride that she was showing such attention to detail (not a trait she demonstrates very often.) Imagine my surprise when I walked into the dining room to find Kaylea with her cooking dough in a ball and her Playdough rolling pin in hand. Apparently, she didn't like the number of cookies that she cut the first time ("there weren't enough, Mom"), so she took them up, smooshed the dough into a ball and traded in her large cookie cutters for smaller ones. Finally, Daddy had to go into the dining room to help her finish. We noticed that Miss C's baking sheet had A LOT more cookies on it than Kaylea's, but we just assumed it was due to placement of cookie cutters and the fact that Kaylea's were a little bit thicker. Later on in the afternoon, after the two sheets of cookies had baked and cooled, the girls began the decorating process. They had Christmas sprinkles along with various shades of frosting and sugars. We thought we had ensured that we would have lots of gorgeous sugar cookies. Well, Auntie and I were quite surprised when we overheard a conversation between Kaylea and Miss C. Kaylea was complaining that she didn't have as many cookies to decorate. Miss C responded frankly, "well, if you hadn't eaten all of your dough when you were cutting out your cookies, you would have more cookies to decorate."

Auntie M and I just looked at each other and nodded saying in unison "ah ha". You probably could have seen the little light bulb light up over our heads at that time. Our synopsis of the afternoon was that Kaylea decided it would be a lot quicker and easier to eat the cookies before they were baked instead of wasting all that time waiting for them to bake and then decorating them.

At the end of the day, we only had about 10 sugar cookies that survived. Oh well, I guess the jewels in the crown on our trays will be a little more sparse this year.

You might wonder what lesson I, as Kaylea's mom, have learned from all of this. Well, there are a few:

1. Nine is not old enough for Kaylea to be trusted with raw cookie dough.
2. When Kaylea is really anxious to do something, she probably has an alterial motive.
3. Once again, Kaylea has shown she doesn't share her mom's great attention to detail.

Tune in again tomorrow and I'm sure I will have a new story for you. If I don't, I will gladly pull one from the archives.