Valentine's Day-Eve

Happy Valentine's Day-Eve is what the 13th is to me.  Maybe bigger and more important than Christmas Eve.  Not in the traditional dinner kind of way.  But in the, 'time to go shopping because if I got candy any earlier it would be gone by now anyways' and the 'hurry, we've got cookies to make' kind of way.  It's a day for spreading the table with an old sheet, cooking and cooling cookies and decorating with lots of sprinkles that don't roll away so fast because of the tablecloth.  And then taking the cloth outside and shaking pink and white and red sprinkles into the rain and watching their colors run on the concrete as they get wet.

We went shopping in the morning and picked up pastries for breakfast the next day.  Got our candies and chocolates.  Made our cookies and frosted them.  And it was one long, eventful, fun day.

Alaska was helping me make the cookie dough and I would scoop the flour/sugar/whatever for her to pour in the mixer.  She would pour it in and then say, "Mom's turn" and let me use my measuring cup to pour an ingredient in before I loaded hers up again.  That was our one requirement.  We each had to have our own measuring cups.  She wasn't much into the sharing that had to go on to use just one measuring cup between the two of us.

The part that she's really pretty good at and loves doing is flipping the switch on the mixer and turning it on.  This time it flipped a little too far.  To a ten.  I realized right away what was wrong but it had already picked up its speed by the time I could get my hands over to turn it off.  Flour went ALL OVER the place and I am almost got mad.  But I didn't.  I took a huge breath, poured in another quarter cup of flour because that was about how much flour was now spread over everything within 12 inches of the mixer.  I usually clean up as I go but this one I knew I had to let go.  I would clean it later.  When I took the bowl off the mixer to put it in the fridge Alaska pointed to all the flour and said, "My mess."  and I just melted.  Not that she could do anything about cleaning it up, but to know that she knew it was hers and take responsibility for it made me feel better about the situation.

She wasn't much interested in cutting out cookies until the very last cookie sheet full, which was just fine with me.  I can only handle so much mess and it was convenient that she wanted to start helping at the end so we could clean up together instead of her getting tired of it and me having to wash her hands and clean up her outfit in the middle of my process.  I let her roll and re-roll the dough as much as she wanted and cut up her cookies.  She loved the smallest heart-cutter.  I use a spatula to get them off the counter and onto the cookie sheet because that saves them from too much finger-pulling destruction.  She couldn't get that part figured out but she would peel her cookies up with her fingers and put them on the spatula for me to move to the cookie sheet.

The last straw was put in when we were decorating cookies.  I could hardly keep her fingers out of the frosting after she had licked them, and we were giving these cookies away.  I gave her the beater to lick and she dropped it on the floor.  It bounced and flicked frosting absolutely all over the carpet and chair legs.  She got scooped up at that point and taken to the bath.  I was on a time crunch to get a few of the cookies ready for my dad to take to the kids in Rainier I had baked them for and had to leave the mess to get 10 or so cookies decorated quick.

Messes were cleaned up and I had dinner made by the time it was time to pick Steven up from work and it felt so good to have done so much amazing-ness in one day.