Good Ideas Gone Bad

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My four pack of movie tickets and free cereal ends tomorrow and so far has only seven entries (what do you not like going to the movies?) Enter here.

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Are you more of a cash kind of person? Enter for a $200 Visa gift card here.

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Stop me when you figure out where I went wrong today.

I agreed to watch a friends two sons this afternoon for a couple hours after church today (no, this is a good thing), beginning at noon.

It turns out that the wee ones had Christmas pageant practice today after church. Church ends at 11:30 or so. The practice I found out was going to be "about forty-five minutes or so." I did not bring food for them to eat lunch. (Sadly, this is not where I went wrong either.)

At ten to twelve, my friend called to confirm that we were still at church and dropped off her boys. I was expecting ten more minutes of pageant practice, and they can be entertained for that long, surely. For ten minutes? No problem. Unfortunately, it was almost forty more minutes of practice. And the wee ones still hadn't eaten lunch. (I'm starting to have a few regrets, but this isn't where I went wrong.)

When we got to our house at 1:45, I discovered that the two boys had eaten lunch already, so they just wanted to play. You can imagine how well lunch went over with Mister Man and Little Miss while their friends are calling to them and trying to get them to play. Little Miss sat right down and ate something, and I contented myself with Mister Man eating two bites of a sandwich and drinking his milk. Nope, still not where I went wrong.

Yesterday, I started baking Christmas cookies. I have to bring in cookies to Mister Man's school twice next week, and I volunteered to be the "nice" mom bringing in not only the nut free cookies (required) but also the egg free (an allergy in Mister Man's class) and dairy free (an allergy in the school in general) cookies. Those cookies were quickly and easily made yesterday, but by the time I finished those, the wee one and I were done baking for the day. The sugar cookie dough sitting in the fridge was going to stay there overnight.

So I decided that today would be a good day to finish the cookies and that the boys could help me. I rolled out the dough, and I showed them the selection of cookie cutters. Surprisingly, this wasn't too painful.

One of the boys asked if he could have a taste of the dough. I agreed and gave him a small sliver. I then spent the next hour and a half chasing after him and making him put pieces of dough down. This was the beginning of the end.

Since they were cut out sugar cookies, I figured we had to decorate them. I was envisioning using my sugar crystals of various colors with the stocking being sprinkled gently with red for the bottom and left clean on top. The snowflake would be perfect sprinkled in blue, while the star would look great in red -- and so on.

Apparently it's been awhile since I've decorated with children. The pile of yellow sugar on one cookie wasn't a huge issue, as I easily spread it around and calmly explained that you couldn't use that much sugar on a single cookie.

When they argued over the sugar and grabbed at the sugar the others had, smashing an elbow into a couple cookies along the way, I quickly devised a color sharing system -- at my call, they would each rotate the sprinkles to the right.

When Mister Man asked to use the new red sprinkles, I helped him open them. At that point, I turned around to do something -- stupidly, I'll admit. I heard the oh no! as I turned back around. Apparently the red sprinkles have very large holes in the top, and a pile of red sprinkles larger than the cookie now lay atop a poor snowman. I took a deep breath and quickly grabbed the still pouring sprinkle container then began trying to scrape up some of the teensy tiny grains of sugar. Muttering under my breath, I gave up.

The first tray done -- albeit over decorated -- I placed into the oven, and we started on the second tray. I placed the red sprinkles out of the way so no one would be tempted, and I contentedly monitored the over sugaring of the cookies. As the timer went off and I turned around to check the cookies in the oven, I really should have known better. One of the boys had opened the red container, and almost half the sprinkles in the bottle were now covering a reindeer and a bell. At least the boy had the good sense to right the bottle and stop pouring after the initial mishap.

I tried tilting the tray to better capture the excess sprinkles, which only worked minimally as both of the boys were putting their fingers in the sprinkles and gobbling the sugar as quickly as they could. My admonitions were met only with sheepish grins and more reaching. I checked the clock to see how long before I headed out for my Christmas party tonight (and by my, I mean me and other moms with no children present).

We continued decorating the cookies, and I continued fending off the boys from the stealing of dough and sugar. Somehow, I don't lose this battle when it's the wee ones, but these boys are more persistent. They also began begging to eat a cookie. I promised everyone could have a cookie once we got the second sheet out of the oven and they'd cooled somewhat (with Little Miss getting one of the strawberry thumbprint dairy free, egg free, nut free but surprisingly not taste free cookies we'd made yesterday).

As the cookies were ready, I placed a cookie for each child onto a plate and made sure they sat at the kitchen table to eat. I continued to work on rolling out the dough and finishing up the cookies. When I next looked up, the children had all left the table, and I can only pray that they washed -- or at least licked off -- their hands before going to play in the rooms with carpet and other light colored objects.

This is about when I realized that over sugared cookies have a bigger problem than just wasting the sugar. About three-quarters of the sugar that had been in the dispensers now lay strewn about not only the kitchen table but on the floor all around the table as far as the eye could see. I sighed and was mildly grateful that this wasn't summer and therefore no ants would smell the sugar that I'd missed, knowing it would take me several rounds of sweeping and mopping to capture all the errant grains.

They did all have fun, and I sent the boys on their merry way not long after with a big plate of the cookies they'd helped me make. I surveyed my kitchen and sighed.

Moral of the story? Making cookies with children isn't a bad thing. However, next time we're going with icing. Sugar is best left in the hands of experts.

And now? I have seven minutes before I need to be at a party that has only adults, some adult beverages and a basement full of delectable goodies. I'm feeling better already.

Easter Party Recap

For all of you who have been waiting to hear how the Easter egg hunt went – with bated breath, I assume – I finally have the update. My apologies for the delay. We went to spend Easter with the in-laws (lots ‘o stories to come yet on this trip, trust me), and I didn’t have access to a computer from Thursday until tonight.

So without further ado:

Yep, I really had 36 kids in my house. At one time. With their moms. Voluntarily. With the idea that they were going to hunt eggs. And silly me, I decided to add more to the festivities because hunting eggs would be done so quickly.

Apparently, my logical mind failed me when I set this up. Every year, my babysitting co-op does an Easter egg hunt. Last year was the first year I was in the co-op, so it’s my only comparison. It was supposed to be at one of the social chair’s houses, but it snowed last Easter. She didn’t want to do it inside (wimp!) so called the park district in a panic and they let us use their gym.

When I went, there were 20 kids or so, and it didn’t seem that bad. They all brought their own baskets, they hunted for eggs their parents had dropped off with no squabbles over some kids getting too many eggs and others not getting any. We then had the Easter Bunny come, and kids got their pictures taken and got a basket of cr@p from him, and they went home after around an hour.

The only issue was that this cost $12 per kid, and this year it was going to be at least $13 or $14. I only have two kids, and I objected to that. Since I’m one of the social chairs this year, I get a little sway. We decided to skip the bunny and just do it at my house. And since we weren’t getting the basket from the bunny, I decided to have the kids decorate cookies (hey, if I did it for Mister Man’s third birthday party, I can certainly do it for older kids!) and we’d order pizza since the hunt wasn’t going to start until 4:30.

Brilliant! Lots of fun! And I could put it on for only $3 (anyone else love the $5.99 huge pizzas from Dominick’s?).

What I didn’t count on was everyone else thinking it was brilliant. And cheap. Needless to say, 36 kids signed up. Literally, three families didn’t participate, all because of other conflicts. Whoops.

And of course, someone found the bunny costume for $75 that the co-op decided to buy for use every year (cheaper than the $95 one company wanted for a rental of a near-identical costume). Dear hubby agreed to wear it and be the bunny for us, so everything was going to be perfect! No, I didn’t say that with a straight face.

Since I was still feeling a little off from the flu earlier in the week and hadn’t yet baked the cookies, I decided to take Wednesday off work. Good idea, me! That meant I was able to get the house straightened up, make all the cookies, restraighten the house, and call the moms who had yet to drop off their eggs to remind them that I needed the eggs the previous Saturday – although I was far nicer in my reminders.

Somehow, I still ended up hiding the eggs as people were arriving, but since no one can be on time, it worked out fine. Some of the moms helped me, while I did two areas – one upstairs for the truly little kids and downstairs for the kids 4 and up. Gotta love the moms who help.

When I realized I needed a stronger voice than mine to get the instructions across to such a large mass of people, two moms volunteered. One gave instructions, and the other was the gatekeeper to the basement so I didn’t have any lawsuits from kids falling down the stairs and being stampeded by the mass behind them. As expected the egg hunt lasted all of 2.4 seconds. I’m amazed by how quickly kids can pick up eggs hidden everywhere but yet pick up toys at the speed of molasses that are in plain sight on the floor. Kid magic, I suppose.

The bunny arrived right on time, and the wee ones flew to the bunny to give him hugs. Seeing the bunny in person, I realized the costume was a bit creepy looking, but my kids loved him at least. Most of the others did, too, and there was quite the conga line to sit on the bunny’s lap. A few kids had the good sense to not want to go near the creepy bunny, and they stayed away. Mister Man, on the other hand, kept getting candy from his now filled bucket and trying to share it with the Easter Bunny who had no pockets. Too cute, but he was so disappointed when he found the Easter Bunny had dropped some on the his way out.

After the bunny came the cookie decorating. I somehow managed to make enough eggs and bunnies for each kid to decorate 3, plus extras for breakage and other issues. I’m still not sure how that happened, since I started off with the goal of one. Fortunately, everyone enjoyed making them and several enjoyed eating them, too. Mister Man didn’t want to make his around everyone else for whatever reason though, and his was decorated after everyone left and he realized he’d missed out on something.

Then the wait for the pizzas started. I had ordered them to be ready at 5 and sent my dad to pick them up – Dominick’s is 3 minutes away – at 4:55. Cookies were all decorated, and the kids had started to tear into the toys and do the usual destruction of the house that occurs when children walk through the door. No pizza. I started to hear questions from the moms. No pizza. Finally, I called my dad to see what was up. Apparently Dominck’s had messed up and had to remake pizzas so he was waiting but would be home shortly.


Five minutes later, he arrived home with nine pizzas. I found out that the problem had been that Dominick’s had burned one pizza, which they gave us anyway. Trust me, I would never have guessed which one it was had I not known one was supposed to be burnt. If it had been me, I would have just left with the other pizzas and gone back later if we still needed the last one, but my dad is too good a guy.

You’d think that 9 pizzas, 36 kids and 14 adults would be a pretty good ratio. Suprisingly, it wasn’t. We had almost 4 pizzas leftover. I tried sending them home with anyone I could, and we gave one to a next door neighbor, but we still had over a whole pizza left at the end. Better too many than too few though!

And the best part – by 7:30, the house was back to normal. Even my husband said it wasn’t too bad to clean up. Little does he know I’ve already been volunteered to host this again next year…. Now, if I can just track down the last two parents who haven’t yet paid for the party….

Happy Easter!