Two hours and fifteen cookies

Look what Walmart had on sale...

...leaf and acorn-shaped cookie cutters. For $1! They were originally $5, and I simply could not leave a bargain like this sitting on the shelf.

Here is where I force Savannah to model them. This is what I got.

Take two. She's not on crack. I promise.

I give up. This is as good as it gets.

Once I got them home, I felt the need to justify my purchase and actually use them.

We're gonna make cookies! I told Savannah, in the hopes that we could create some sweet mother-daughter memories as we measured sugar and stirred eggs and vanilla together.

Well, we definitely created memories. The first one was when I turned my back and Savannah helped herself to a heaping spoonful of flour. As it turns out, flour wasn't quite the treat she was hoping it would be, and she immediately freaked out when it turned gluey in her mouth, and she started crying for help.

She then pulled her chair up to the sink and begin to vigorously stir a bowl full of water that was soaking there. Bate, bate, choc-o-lat-e, she sang out. (For those of you who have not seen this Dora episode, pay this no mind. Suffice it to say that pretty much everything - breakfast oatmeal, bathtub water, a bowl of cereal - is fair game for the Bate Chocolate song).

She helped me press the cookie cutters into the dough, and then returned to her sink of dirty dishwater. My patience for simultaneously making cookies and memories vanished when she slopped dirty water all over my floor, and I banished her to the living room to do puzzles with Daddy.

Because Fit Friday is looming ever closer, I only made half of a batch so that the temptation wouldn't be hanging around the house all week, imploring me to eat them. It only took me two hours to produce about 15 little cookies - I was hunched over my counter for a good part of that time, painstakingly spooning on colored frosting. Now I know why all of those fancy cookie shops charge $3.50 (or more) per cookie. So time consuming. I wish I had better tools to work with, because it was actually kind of fun. Although my back didn't think so.

I put the cookies on a plate (to take a picture for the blog, of course - there is no other reason that I would actually dirty a plate if I didn't have to) and carried them to my apparently dessert-deprived family.

Within about 5 minutes, the plate had dwindled to this.

Mostly thanks to my skinny hubby, who can afford to eat them. Better him than me, right? I finally put the remaining 6 cookies up because I figured the indulging would continue until the plate was empty.

So the leaves are going into retirement until next year - now it's time to break out the snowmen and angels and Christmas trees!