Home Sweet Home Place: Breathe

Friday, December 23, 2011

Breathe

I have a million things to do and about 36 hours to do them! Anyone in the same boat? (Please say yes!)

Yesterday was baking day...or supposed to be baking day. I had dreams of baking and decorating sugar cookies and all sorts of goodies. But between entertaining the girls and the other daily tasks my day of baking quickly went sideways.

In all the years of baking and decorating sugar cookies, this has been by far my worst. I ended up making 4 different double batches because the dough just wasn't turning out right. Baking went ok. But the frosting proved to be an utter disaster. I couldn't get the consistency right and between having to stop and start my cookie production line in order to referee the endless battles over toys, puzzle pieces and hair pulling, my frosting eventually went bad. UGH.

I think I started at about 8:30 am yesterday and by 5:30 pm I think I had about 15 completed cookies. Seriously.

I am a planner and a to-do lister so by the end of the day my wits were frazzled. FRAZZLED. And I realized I had completely lost the whole point in doing all this baking and decorating and wrapping. For me, it is all about them. Grace and Charlotte. They clearly weren't having fun watching me look at the clock and frantically dive back into the frosting bowl. And I was DEFINITELY not having fun.

So I had to take a deep breath and tell myself that it was ok that 35+ cookies weren't' going to be decorated. I've never left any cookies unfrosted. This was huge for me. The cookies that I somehow managed to frost look so sad and pathetic. They aren't the works of art I had dreamed of...we'll just have to shift that dream to next year - when everyone's (i.e. Charlotte's) attention spans are a bit longer and we aren't climbing on the countertops and knocking over bowls of frosting and sprinkles and driving our mothers to drink....again, I'm not alone in this, right?

We did manage a little fun. Grace frosted and decorated for the first time her very own cookie. This one is extra special and will definitely be displayed for the big man himself on Christmas Eve.