Besides water, another theme this week in the frantically-trying-to-clean-up-majorly-for-our-craft-show household has been that part of holiday “prep” known as teacher gifts and end of year celebrations (continuing into next week, with Hilltown Charter School’s Solstice celebrations—and the play Lucien’s class is creating).
In second grade, this includes the Cookie Swap.
Perhaps you can picture twenty-plus second graders each bearing twenty-plus cookies (and boxes of tea for Mr. Bushey, the kind custodian and their partner in recycling, which they do for the school) in twenty-plus containers and then twenty-plus empty containers on top of that. I have seen this. The room fills with lots and lots of cookie containers and lots and lots of grinning children. What about the actual exchange? I’m not parent who volunteers for such events, so I can’t tell you, except it’s really, really fun (Remy’s my third kid in this wonderful second grade classroom and so I can promise you it’s really, really fun, direct quote). As for my not volunteering to help at the cookie exchange? I kind of like what happens in second grade to stay in second grade.
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Perhaps, too, you can picture a very temporarily displaced family, a bunch of sore throats and runny noses, a very messy house that requires every surface empty by Sunday, carpools, hummus to make for the middle school dance, oh, work, you know, perhaps you can imagine that kind of scene (and if you click back a post, you’ll be reminded of what the front of our house looks like just now, with the septic system in the yard).
The scene wasn’t quiet. Along with a tremendous amount of drilling in street noises this week—there’s a gas leak two doors down that’s brought its own work crew, practically on alternating days—Saskia is pretty much obsessed with the Sesame Street video C is For Cookie. She asks every person with a personal screen (computer, iphone, itouch) to play it. She’s really cute. And she’s alarmingly persistent. So, we’ve heard that song about a zillion times. Lest you wonder, Cookie cookie cookie starts with ‘C.’
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What did Remy want to bring to the second grade cookie exchange? Gingerbread people, decorated with hard icing, just like Kate’s family makes. Of course he did. Insert this mama thinking, shoot me now.
Some of my wiser friends counseled that I buy the cookie dough in the tube and cut the cookie dough into cookie-sized pieces and let that be that. Perhaps, I should have listened.
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My mistake by the way was not asserting my limits up front because as much as I fantasized being as good a mom as Kate’s mom (my dear friend, by the way, who makes better dinners and does the holidays up for a solid month in fully decorated house glory—and seriously, I love that she does, because it brings her pleasure, at least mostly), I’m not that good a mom. Before you rush to type in something like but you are as good a mom, don’t worry too much. I’m—like that old saw, which should be our gold standard—a good enough mom most of the time. The good enough mom most of the time falls short frequently. Ask our friend, Amy, who was here during the big Cranberry Oatmeal Cookie Meltdown of 2010 (not to be confused with the music and kids’ literature Meltdown event coming early in 2011, sponsored by the radio station; that will be fun).
Our meltdown occurred after I spent the walk to school and the walk home talking him down, especially when I got him from school and he clearly had the sore throat (and aching legs; I nearly dragged him home, literally) and saw he didn’t have the energy to make complicated cookies or even semi-complicated cookies after the five o’clock carpool I had to drive. I’d ratcheted him down from gingerbread—to be made next week, as presents for our Christmas brunch guests—to sugar cookies, not rolled but balled or maybe if the batter worked, rolled last minute, with colored sugar (green). I thought by the time I left for the carpool that we were on the same page.
I was wrong. Of course, I was wrong.
Ask Amy if this is how it went: I barreled through with the cranberry oatmeal cookies, which he somewhat helped with and then stormed off from and then returned to. I was hugely apologetic, wiggly in tone but firm in action. It was a bit of momfail. Except, it was the best I could do under the circumstances. With four kids, to be honest, under the circumstances is codeword for most of the time.
It’s also true that even though most of the time I do fall short, I also do what’s—to my mind—most important: I hug my kids a lot, I cheer them on, I try to hold them up to some standards of kindness (as my writer friend deemed a worthy goal linking to a piece of mine for that reason this past week) and I certainly support each of them in being uniquely his or her own person. To wit, the scrappy girl does love her shoes and although the feminist—clothes don’t define a gal—in me is cringing at myself, I knew a present she’d really like is a pair of red clogs (don’t tell), so I ordered them. The seventh grader wants soccer jerseys. Style matters to these kids, huh?
By the time he acquiesced and ate one, Remy noted, “Cranberries are good,” as in, they beat raisins for oatmeal cookies, and “it’s better to have not the best (for the cookie swap) than nothing.”
There might have even been a store-bought cookie in that tin he brought home. The world so did not end.
I can only hope that my kids wind up looking back upon their childhoods and their parents and feeling the parents tried hard and loved hard and that everyone laughed a lot and mostly had fun together.
In the end, the cookie swap was deemed really, really fun and now knowing that his papa loves oatmeal cranberry cookies the most, he even wants to make a batch for the papa’s forthcoming birthday (don’t tell).
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And because it’s cookie season, you can imagine how much I enjoyed this piece in the New York Times entitled Let It Dough.
