Today I missed Yesterday

Nicholas is Star Of The Week this week at school.

This means that, all week long, he gets to be line leader. It also means he gets to bring in a toy to show and tell to the class. And a snack to share with the class. And a photo collage to show off his family. Which is great, isn't it? Except, as with many other things, this is something engineered to focus on the child, but which actually required a lot of extra hours and participation from ME.

Which is fine. I don't mind making a picture collage - even though I had to wrestle with the printer and find special paper and print out photos on Steve's work printer instead because mine was out of ink. No problem.

But tomorrow he needs to bring in snack. Nicholas wanted to bring in peanut butter and jelly sushi, but of course we can't because of the peanut butter. Instead, we decided to make cut out cookies for Halloween and decorate them. But I didn't make the dough yesterday, and this morning I didn't have time because I had to get the boys to Gymnastics. The kind I make requires the dough be refrigerated 3 to 4 hours before rolling it, so as soon as we were back and the boys had lunch and I got them down for a nap I threw together a couple of batches. And I have to tell you, I don't understand baking. I put it all together, and I'm supposed to refrigerate it, but instead of a ball of dough I have what looks like a pile of sand, and no matter how I try to get it to stick together it keeps falling apart. And refrigerating it never really helps.

So when the boys wake up and I distract them until the dough has been in the fridge almost 3 hours, I take the balls of sand out and attempt to turn them into something I can roll. But Nick is three steps ahead and already trying to open the sprinkles, and Nathan is frantically trying to use his cookie cutters to cut the pile of sand into pumpkin cookies. After much coaxing of both boys and dough, I finally manage to roll something out, and the boys start using their cookie cutters. Only Nicholas doesn't understand that you can't overlap the cookies, and Nathan eats each dough shape as soon as it's cut unless I am watching and take it away. By this time Andrew has climbed up the stairs three times, has splashed the dog's water all over the place and is soaking wet, and is howling loudly.

We somehow manage to cut out a bunch of cookies and put them in the oven. The boys then get to decorate, which they do by dumping as many sprinkles on a cookie as they can. I try to outline the cookies in orange icing, but the result is spectacularly runny, since I had to heat it in the microwave but left it in there too long because Andy was crying and the next batch of cookies was ready and Nicholas was screaming at Nathan because he was eating all his special cookies for school.

We have a plate with a number of strangely decorated, dry tasting cookies. It is what we are bringing for snack. Next time we have to bring snack, I'm bringing Chips Ahoy. And for Christmas this year we shall use the premade ones, with the Christmas Trees already painted on.