Christmas Cookies

We made Christmas Cookies yesterday.

Let's just be honest as parents for one minute. Hold on while I hide my super mom cape. OK.. Baking with kids is not always fun. It's stressful and crazy. There's a thousand tiny freshly licked fingers reaching and grabbing every edible item possible and fights over who gets to stand on the chair closest to the mixer. All the while, visions of kids getting hurt when they get too close to the stove or reaching into the mixer dance through the mom's head. Then there's the whole different item of them catching Listeriosis from sopping up all the raw broken egg of the floor with their tongue. It's like a Martha Stewart style nightmare come true. Plus there's the fact that there's no such thing as patience when working with kids 5, or 25, and under.

And that's how our time baking together started yesterday.

I was stressed and can now repeat in my sleep the words, "If you lick the cookie cutter again, you are going to have to leave the kitchen."  Well that person left the kitchen and  I washed every single cookie cutter by hand..... all 65 of them.

So when it came time to decorate, I will still stressed and dreading it. I would have almost rather volunteered for a root canal than give them messy icing and pretend to be happy. But I figured that I would just it done quickly and get it cleaned up so I could put them in bed for the night. It wouldn't be a fun decorating time, it would be the race to the finish line and my prize would be a quiet house. So off we went on our decorating adventure without any of the proper tools and you know what? It was fun. lots of fun.

I couldn't find icing tips and squeeze bottles were at the store but we compromised with Ziploc bags and spooned icing.

They were quiet and concentrated so hard that for once, I had to keep the conversation rolling.

Then there was this lovable, huggable, Buddha belly thing:

This is her "cheese" face. (side note: this kid loves cheese and her new favorite word is cheese). Yes, she is covered in icing and squashed cookie mash. She was into everything, especially when I wasn't looking.

Here are the finished cookies. I didn't let them dry before putting them on plates with raised sides and the icing leaked off the cookie but they are still perfect.

So when it comes to baking with kids, maybe it's not so bad after all. The kids are fine, no one fell into the stove and we did not visit the brand new Children's hospital down the street.

Now I'm going to go put my Super Mom cape back on and eat a cookie, or two.. because calories are nothing when you're Super Mom.