Monday, 19 September 2011

• Hazardous Sugar Cookies

   

  

  Well, Blake has turned three today. Rather uneventful day, considering I had to work so he spent most of the day with his grandmother, although I'm sure him and his brother kept her on her toes. They usually do. So I decided to do something special. Something new. Something he had never done before. I bought some sugar cookie dough. Waited until his brother was asleep, and then proceeded to have him 'help' me make the sugar cookies. Granted, his fine motor skills aren't the greatest. He gets a little over-excited. He jumps in place. A lot. But considering all this, he did pretty good helping me mix the dough, and I'd say he showed far more restraint than I was expecting.

  I was thinking this was going to work. Something new, and Blake hadn't totally thrown it out the window yet. No meltdowns. No tantrums. No throwing. Onward and upward. I sprinkled the flour on the table, slapped the dough on the flour, and tried to roll it out. Meanwhile, Blake had spotted the cookie cutters. He's done the play-doh thing before. He knows (kind of ) the basic concept of using a cookie cutter. Now, let me tell you that Blake doesn't know the meaning of the word "wait". He wants instant gratification. So while we have two to three inches of cookie dough in a ball, he wants to use the cookie cutter on that. No, he won't wait for me to roll it out. No, it obviously doesn't need to be flat. He wants it just like it is. After about thirty seconds of trying to use a car cookie cutter and failing, he finally turns to me. "Pits it?" (fix it?) so again I try rolling it out. Which is met by stomping, crying, and trying to move the rolling pin away. Again: "Pits it?" so once more I try with the rolling pin, which is again met with more tears. At this point I'm starting to get a little irked, but I knew that something like this would happen. So I let him cry for the minute it took me to roll out the dough, and let him go to town.

  He had a blast. We have a box of 101 cookie cutters, and he wanted to use every - single - one. But there wasn't enough dough. And not to mention that he would have a 'mini-meltdown' every time I used to spatula to place one of the cookies on the baking sheet. And when I put them in the oven. And when time I took them out. And when I bit the head of a ghost off. And to top it all off, he cried when I tried putting them away. Cookie cutters had to be scurried away and stashed in the bathroom after he used it, since his visual memory is downright scary. That means I made 101 trips to the bathroom, because I couldn't take the cookie dough away, to place it in the oven, so he used the same dough over and over which rendered it useless for baking. He went until there were no more cookie cutters, except the star he held in his hand. I was still at a loss as to how exactly to get him away from the cookie dough. An hour activity filled with two dozen cookies had turned into a three hour play session with a grand total of seven cookies. Seven and a half, if you count the remains of the ghost. I looked at the clock, it was past ten. The kitchen was a mess, and he couldn't go to bed upset. I knew I needed to divert his attention somehow...

  so I brought out the play-doh...

  At least with play-doh, I don't have flour everywhere.

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