Create A Cookie Day

Today we had a houseful of kids (and their moms) over for some cookie decorating. Thankfully Paul was home to watch the twins because they would not have been a fan of cookie decorating. I could not have paid enough attention to them and they could not have participated (outside of eating a lot of junk). So Paul whisked them off to the basement and I got to devote my attention to the older kids which was fun. In preparation for the morning I just kept reminding myself that this was going to probably be a far more loud and chaotic experience than I imagined it to be and that the results would probably not be as pretty or even as edible as I expect them to be. So I had to do a lot of managing my expectations. I must have done a really good job of that because I thought the kids did a great job. And the kids all created some real masterpieces. In fact, I was so pleased with the morning I'm already planning on doing it again next year. It was fun to do this for the kids and they all seemed to have a good time either decorating cookies or playing with each other. I even rolled out some dough for them and let them cut out their own and get their hands in the flour, which they really loved. And surprisingly, despite the mass amounts of flour that ended up on kids and in my kitchen everything is already all cleaned up a few hours later.

Pre-decorating but missing one cookie decorator.

Mid-decorating craziness. 

Look closely at Jack's tray. See the pile of green sprinkles and marshmallows? There's a cookie under there and at the taking of this picture he was not yet done "decorating" that cookie. I know the entire container of yellow sprinkles ended up on it as well. All of his cookies were of course blue. What other color would they be? Jack definitely would win the award for the most sprinkles used on one cookie.

Some of the finished products. Some of these were done by the kids, some of them done by the adults. I think once we (the adults) started decorating some ourselves, we realized that it wasn't so easy to make the cookies look as pretty as we picture them in our heads. I made lots of gingerbread men to use as ornaments and after trying to decorate a few I decided they really just looked best plain with a cute ribbon.