Home sweet home

It's been quite awhile since I've had time to blog. I had to take a hiatus from writing because my plate was just too full. In the last year, we've been repairing our basement from a very freakish flash flood in the neighborhood, then preparing our house to sell (the bigger our boys get, the smaller our house feels!), keeping it clean while it was on the market and then making the difficult decision to pull it off the market when it didn't sell in the time frame we had. It was a very long year, with a lot of back-breaking labor (I never want to have to refinish wood floors again!), with very little in the way of pay-off, except that our house now looks as good as it did when we moved into it eight years ago, before we had three little boys! I give it less than three months to revert back to it's well-loved state.

However, now that I'm not trying to get some home-improvement project done or worrying about keeping a spotless house with every surface gleaming and everything in its rightful place, I have time to be an interactive mom again. So far, the kids and I have been baking up a storm and making a glorious mess in the kitchen. Today, we baked 8 dozen sugar cookies, and then frosted and decorated them. Powdered sugar dusted every surface, sprinkles crunched underfoot, and an egg white ended up in a gooey slime all over the floor at one point. But did I care? NO! We thoroughly enjoyed our day and ended up with half of our cookies decorated. The sprinkle factory had to shut down when I ran out of powdered sugar to make frosting. I didn't quite estimate correctly the output on a double batch of my great-grandmother's sugar cookies! I had piles and towers of cookies everywhere. As it was, we did get the quantity done that we needed for the boys' school Halloween parties next month. They are now safely tucked away in the freezer and I can cross that off my list of things-to-do.

Today's time in the kitchen with the boys also gave me a proud Momma Moment. All of my cookie-decorating lessons I've given the kids in the last few years have paid off. I noticed today that instead of licking fingers to get the sticky frosting off them while they were decorating their cookies, they would carefully wipe them on the paper towels I had provided. The one time one of them slipped up and took a lick, he remembered to stop, and before touching anything else, got down from his chair and washed his hands in the bathroom. That's my boy.