Helpful Mom

So my day did not go as planned, I’m sure I’m not the only one that happened to today.  See my mom was supposed to take my girls for the day so they could do fun Christmas things and I could have time to do those undone projects.  But instead it snowed, and snowed, and snowed.  My mom couldn’t make it to the expressway so I being sick still had to keep my housebound family happy and give up my dreams of clean places and projects done.

This being the first real snow storm my girls can remember they didn’t understand that if we couldn’t make it to Grandma’s then we can’t make it anywhere else either.  Joel actually couldn’t get into our driveway because our road had 8 inches of snow on it because it had not been plowed all day!!  So in an effort to keep ourselves from going crazy I tried to think up special things to do with the girls even though all I wanted to do is sit and watch cartoons with them all day.  First we pulled out a bubble machine to play with, when I couldn’t get that to work I decided I’d give the girls an early Christmas present.  I had found this really cute Little Mermaid table and chair, and tea cart set on Craigslist for $5 over the summer and had been trying to keep it hid all these months.  So we bundled up and trudged through the snow to pull out their surprise.  They were both so excited and spent an hour downstairs in their playroom while I rested on the couch.

Christmas cookies

After a while I summoned the courage to make Christmas cookies with the girls.  I had picked up a Betty Crocker gingerbread cookie mix yesterday thinking over Christmas week we’d make them sometime for fun.  Well now was as good a time as any.

Baking with preschoolers can be quite fun because they find every step very exciting and want to help and know what you are doing and why.  To successfully cook with kids you have to steel yourself with patience, it WILL take longer than if you do it yourself, and it will be messy.  I think there were equal parts sprinkles on the floor and cookies.  That said here are a few tips, let them have input, what shapes to make.  Don’t worry if they don’t understand the idea of cutting the cookies out really close together, you can always reroll the dough.  Let them decorate their own cookies without you correcting them constantly.  I put out all the Christmas shapes in multiple so they girls didn’t fight over the star or snowman, etc.  They each had their own chair to stand on and they had to take turns cutting out cookies.

Once the cookies cooled completely I gave each girl a plate to decorate their cookies on.  Put frosting in a

Christmas cookies

ziploc bag, seal it, squeezing the air out and snip one corner of the bag off will create a reduced mess when frosting.  We just did squiggles and sprinkled with colored sprinkles, they may not be fancy but we had fun making them and That is the point.   And an easy idea so that you don’t feel like you are wasting all those sprinkles(Katrina used an entire bottle on two cookies!) is to set aside some uncooked dough.  You can then make balls of cookie dough and roll them in the excess sprinkles and bake them for about 8 minutes, they are simple and they kids can help make those too and they look like tree ornaments round and sparkly.  Once we are all done, shoo the kids out of the kitchen with a cookie so you can restore order to your kitchen.

We had a great time and it made our day fly by.  Eventually our neighbor with a plow came by and cleared our driveway and they helped push Joel’s car off the road into our driveway just in time for the plow to come by.  New York, gotta love it ;P