Cookie Party

As sweet and delicious as cookies can be they can also be a source of cutthroat competition and lessons in life.

For twelve years my friend Donna has hosted a lively and lovely holiday cookie exchange. Donna’s friends gather for an evening in December to share holiday cookies, have a cocktail and learn about a local non-profit serving women. Each of us goes home with a yummy plate of cookies, having had a good time and also having made a donation to the charity. Many of the guests have been friends for almost 20 years. We have been there for each other in good times and in bad, most of us for longer than our marriages.

But, for one evening each year we put aside our love for each other and set out to bake a cookie that is not only tasty but award winning. Most cookie exchanges are not contests but at this party we vote on the cookies and the winning baker get bragging rights for the year. This brings out the competitive beast in all of us. For weeks ahead of time we plan, scheme and keep secrets all in the hope of smoking the pants off the competition. The twist is that while you can see the cookies and you can hear about the cookies, you cannot taste them before voting. Each woman needs to advocate for her cookie in front of the group.

And so it was, for many years….each of us baking cookies that were beautiful, and made from recipes and with ingredients that had pedigree: Irish butter, Swiss chocolate, a recipe from nuns in France. Many of us made many practice batches to get the drizzled caramel just right. It was mostly in good fun, but all of us wanted to win, win, win.

And then one year it was put in perspective. Donna had made new friends during the year and one of these women was at the party. I always liked it when there was a “new” person because inevitably she would not understand the competition and bring a pedestrian cookie like a basic chocolate chip or even worse, let her small children decorate the cookies into something resembling haystacks of pink frosting. When these newbie cookies landed on the table, I always felt smug. This new friend followed the trend and brought peanut butter balls. Come on I thought. Is that even a real cookie? Are peanut butter balls even baked? I was at least guaranteed not to receive the booby prize.

As usual, we went around the room, each touting our wares and coming closer to the peanut butter ball lady. When we came to the newbie, she told the story of her cookie.

The previous year she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had been though awful, horrible chemotherapy and radiation. She had lost weight and was very weak. When she was at her most fragile a friend had decided to nourish her with fat, sugar and protein-filled peanut butter balls. While sick the woman could not keep down any food but somehow she was able to eat the balls. Day-by-day, she was fueled by the balls. As she ate she got stronger, and as she got stronger she got better. The lame, no-bake, simple peanut butter balls helped to save her life.

You can guess whose cookie (or ball) won that year. It was the cookie that celebrated health and friendship and love. That year I was reminded what a well-baked cookie is for.

This year as I think about what cookie to bake I care less about the perfect cookie and more about baking a cookie that is filled with the love and admiration I have for my friends. Hopefully my friends will taste what I am trying to say because even though I will be happy for whoever wins it wouldn’t be so terrible if that winner were me.

Dangerous

Today is October 28th. It is a gorgeous fall day. The sky is pure blue, the air is clear and crisp, and the golden colors of the season are blazing. Today I went for a walk and the children went for a bike ride with Dad. Neighbor’s porches are alight with orange pumpkins and golden sunshine is streaming through the trees. As glorious as today is, I cannot completely enjoy it because it is tinged with danger.

Every fall in Wisconsin we are treated to lovely days like today. But, in this season the weather can turn quickly and we will be plunged into winter that lasts until April. Each morning I look at the weather report and review the forecast. I know that the forecast can be unreliable but I peek ahead so I won’t be surprised when the weather really does turn. The amazing days of fall are tinged with the looming risk of winter and so I live on the edge in the danger zone.

The danger of fall also brings ambivalence and indecision. When I fold laundry, my baskets were filled with and unruly combination of short sleeved shirts tossed like a salad with fleece, wool socks and long pants and shirts. A couple of weeks ago we had a morning that was colder than it has been since last May. We had a mad scramble to find wool socks, jackets and gloves that were put away last spring. By the afternoon jackets and sweaters had been discarded and we were all back to shirtsleeves until sunset. Since then we have continued to vacillate back and forth between being cozy and sitting like chameleons with our skin exposed to the afternoon sun.

Halloween is only three days away and the forecast is calling for rain mixed with snow. A cold and wet evening would make it scarier than usual as pathetic, damp, cold children with face paint dripping down their cheeks would darken our door.

Perhaps it is because the season feels dangerous that each lovely day must be appreciated and savored. And, perhaps fall is my favorite season because I actually enjoy the danger. So, I salute the season and say, bring it on baby, I have found my snow boots already!!

Pollywog Miracle

Just before school started our family went canoing down a local river. On our journey my 5-year-old daughter discovered a little inlet filled with pollywogs. Of course the children wanted to keep dozens. We negotiated this down to four lucky (or unlucky) pets. We put the critters in our water bottle along with some cool river water and hoped for the best. I was not optimistic. Over the next couple of hours the bottle rolled around the bottom of canoe occasionally being shaken to make sure the animals were alive. Amazingly when we arrived back at the car, they were still swimming. I was not optimistic that they would make it home alive. Again they surprised me.

Now home we got out an old terrarium and searched the internet for care instructions. We found out that pollywogs prefer pond water. My husband took a bucket down to our neighborhood lake, filled it up, toted it home and after spilling icky water all over the kitchen filled the terrarium for our newest family members. More searching online revealed that pollywogs like lettuce that has been frozen and defrosted so it has a nasty, mushy texture.

Again I was not optimistic and thought they would croak before morning. But I was wrong again.

Every morning since then I have checked their tank and each morning they are still alive. Yesterday I checked and noticed that two of them had started to grow little legs. It seems as if we are succeeding in actually raising pollywogs. With some luck we will release these frogs back into the river in about a month. Again and again I am convinced the will die and they seem to persist. It is an amphibias miracle.

All of this has been happening while I sent my youngest child off to kindergarten. Just two days after the arrival of the pollywogs my daughter received kisses and hugs, waved and hopped on board the yellow school bus. She had a great first day and good days since. She is tired and cranky when she comes home but each night as she sleeps she rejuvenate, wakes up refreshed and hops back on that bus each morning. It seems like a miracle.

Maybe we are able to raise pollywogs because we have successfully managed to raise two children to school age. When we brought home our tiny little babies I was really not optimistic. They were so needy and we had never done such a thing. We consulted the internet regularly, made nasty, mushy food for them and wiped up far worse than pond water. When they were babies each milestone seemed like a miracle. Soon they learned to use the legs they had sprouted and developed more and more skills as they learned to live more independently from us. Now they are hopping on the bus and making their own little lives. Fortunately for me each evening thet still hop home to the terrarium and still rely on me for their food.

I am happy about this because I am not quite ready to release them into the wild.

My Missing Arm

After my son was born, I was hit with the baby blues. He was my first child and the first months of parenting were filled with a bitter mix of failure and loathing. I felt like I had had a perfectly lovely life and I f*#ked it up with an inconsolable ball of annoyance. The situation was exacerbated by my failure to produce enough milk and his penchant for needing attention when I desperately wanted to be doing anything else. At one low point I fantasized about throwing him off the Martha’s Vineyard Ferry.

Fast forward eight years adding a daughter to the mix…

This weekend my son left for his first week away from home without a parent. My mother invited him for a week of intergenerational overnight camp in northern Minnesota. When my mom suggested the plan we were all excited. How fun for him to spend a week away testing his independence. The idea of a week with only one child to feed, bathe, clean-up after and drive around made me ecstatic. This was in the depths of winter.

Now it is summer and the idea is reality. It turns out that I am remarkably sad that he is gone. Sure things are easier. I don’t have to listen to sibling fighting, I have one less child to cart around and my son’s bed never needs making. But, our house is B-O-R-I-N-G. I feel like my left arm is gone.

I find myself looking longingly at his pictures. When I was folding his socks I felt whimsical about the stains on the bottom of his socks since they represent his joie de vivre running outside shoeless. When he is home that same joie causes me to yell at him about ruining his socks. And this too…I have this habit of sniffing my son’s head. I love the smell. In the summer it is a mix of sunscreen, chlorine, and his sweat. I liken it to the smell of sunshine. Luckily his sister is still here and she has the smell too but half of my sunshine is missing.

What happened to me? I am not sure when or how it happened but at some point I went from being a really annoyed parent to somebody who is mooning over my absent eight-year-old. The good news is that I realized how much I like having my children around while they are still young enough to enjoy having me around. The bad news is that in another ten years my son will leave home and I now expect a major bout of post-post-post partum depression. Luckily this time I will be well rested!

Epilogue

My mom called midway through their week. The good news was that my son was homesick his first night and missed home. The bad news is that he quickly moved past this and has been too busy to call home even once. This does not bode well for my future.

So High I Can't Get Over Them...Yet

I realized something recently that has me both depressed and enlightened. My realization is that most of my personal barriers are different than I thought they were. Sadly, I am finding that my truer barriers reflect far deeper flaws than I had hoped. About a year ago I decided that to remove two barriers that I thought would open the road to peace, joy and everlasting happiness…time and weight. I decided that in order to “live my best life” (thanks Oprah) that I needed to really focus on what would make me happier and that was to lose weight and quit my job to have more flexibility. I postulated that if I quit my job I would have lots of time to learn new things, volunteer more, develop myself, be a more patient parent and wife, blah, blah, blah. I also postulated that losing weight would make me more confident in the world, better at meeting new people, able to deepen intimacy, blah, blah, blah. 

Well, here I am six months post job quitting and 45lbs lighter and guess what? I am still too busy and still not physically confident. It turns out that the things that I believed were my barriers weren’t. Finding euphoria and everlasting peace turns out to be harder than I ever imagined. So, I continue to work on the bigger goals with the help of a shelf full for self-improvement books. In the meantime, I am holding out some that thought I was wrong and pinning my hopes for personal happiness on losing a few more lbs and having a few more hours when my daughter goes to kindergarten. 

In the Way of Progress

I have not written anything recently because I keep waiting for the perfect idea to strike me. I keep coming up with ideas and then either can’t finish them or lose interest. This feels kind of counterproductive because the whole point of the blog was to try to hone my writing skills by writing regularly. Yet again I am letting my search for the perfect get in the way of progress. So, I am resolving to try to write 3 times a week. Even if it is very short.  

My father told me that “Perfect is the enemy of good”. With you, dear reader, as my witness I resolve to fight the enemy and work to accept good rather than doing nothing in my strive for perfection.

Searching for Chaz

Snow shoveling is a fact of life in Wisconsin. I hate it but my husband likes it so things are usually fine. My problem is what to do when he travels. 

Last year this problem was neatly solved by an extremely entrepreneurial neighborhood kid (let’s call him Jake) who ran a small snow blowing business. This kid was AMAZING. He would be out at 6am before school, he was reliable, he billed efficiently and in the off season he taught me tennis..really! Unfortunately Jake was more loyal to his education than me and he left for college this fall. I had heard to that Jake was going to try to find somebody to take over his business but as of the first major snowfall I had heard nothing. 

Now I have a lead!

Last week I spoke to some neighborhood teenagers who said that, “Chaz” had take over Jake’s business. The problem is that I don’t know who this Chaz is. Where does Chaz live? Does Chaz have a snow blower? Does Chaz have email? Does Chaz have a tennis racquet?

This kind of thing seems to happen a lot. Somebody knows somebody or something that will solve some seemingly major problem in my life. Unfortunately the solution is provided with incomplete information and I am left searching for the answer… the perfect cookie recipe, a great handyman, a fool proof way to occupy a child, the perfect diet. Usually I give up before I find the magic bullet and as luck would have it I seem okay living without these problems solved. But there is always the dream…

So I am searching for Chaz. If you know him, please send him my way!