Parental Advice Column #1

I am a great parent.  Maren told me so last night when she was eating dinner at 9:45 since I had forgotten to make dinner because I was lost in sugar cookies up to my elbows and I mentioned that I am a bad parent.  She set me straight and told me I'm a good one.  Based on that, I think I will start to impart bits of wisdom on parenting and general life skills to all of you who may not be as awesome as I am.

Here goes.  How to get the day off of work  and shirk your responsibilities with a bottle of maraschino cherries.

The first thing you have to decide to do is make some Christmas cookies.  And don't settle for just some slice-off reindeer faces.  No.  Make sure you double the sugar cookie batch, and also give in to the pressure from your kids to make an additional batch of gingerbread because they claim to have never had it before.  What?  I'm sure I make a homemade batch every year that we use for the handmade gingerbread Christmas village and train set.  Also, be sure to feel guilty that so far you haven't made any Christmas treats and are sure your children will be scarred for life because all their Christmas memories will consist of mom yelling, "Don't touch the tree.  All the needles will fall off.", or, "No you may not eat all you advent calendar chocolates in one day.  Oh, you already have?  Well you won't get any more candy from me.", or perhaps the classic mom threat , "If you don't clean up your room, I'm going to tell  Santa not to come this year."  (I don't actually use that one- just heard about it from some other lady).

So yesterday we had a clear afternoon once we got home from church.  We did our traditional napping, snacking, and bickering about not getting to play the Wii because it's a Sunday.  I had lofty goals of adding scripture study, visiting the sick, and some quality family board gaming, but instead had the genius idea to make cookies.  The kids were so happy and helped us pick out cookie cutter shapes, like the Christmas pig, the holiday tombstone/but could be an elf hat, and the ever-faithful circle.  (We may need to find a few more shapes for next year.)  They helped us roll and cut cookies for a cumulative total of about 11 minutes while my husband and I proceeded to roll, cut, and bake for a solid hour.

Next on the list was making the frosting.  I include a secret ingredient in my frosting, but as it is crucial to this sequence of events, I am forced to reveal it here.  I always put in maraschino cherry juice for my liquid instead of milk- it gives it great taste and a subtle pink color.  So yummy.  (Thanks for the tip Heather).   But take note that I only use the juice, leaving an entire bottle of drained cherries unsupervised.  Ryan and I frosted the cookies for another hour and a half (and I am not even exaggerating).  That is why I didn't realize that I hadn't fed my kids until Maren asked me if she really had to brush her teeth  and go to bed before she ate dinner.  We made scrambled egg sandwiches and rushed into jammies and into bed.  I went back to the kitchen to clean up the enormous mess and found---- a completely empty cherry jar.

My assumption was that the kids had eaten them, of course.  What I didn't know until 2 am when I was awakened by a 7-year-old barfing cherries was that one child had eaten all of them.  The entire bottle.  And she was regretting it.  And so was I.  She got up once more for round two and then was able to sleep.  She woke up this morning tired, but hadn't had any difficulty in several hours.  I was pretty sure she didn't have the flu, was just affected by cherry overdose, so I had her get ready for school.

I left for work and my husband called and said he had taken Sarah to Grandma's instead of to school, because she said her tummy still hurt  (that and Maren was going to Grandma's for a wonderful day of undiluted attention and move watching because our regular sitter is out of town and Sarah realized it).  I walked into my work office, asked how busy it was, found out it was manageable for my colleague, deposited my large bag of homemade cookies that I brought, said goodbye and started back to Grandma's house.

Understandably, my girls weren't very excited to come home with me.  They were smack dab in the middle of Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus  in front of a cozy fire (again not exaggerating) and really wanted to finish.  Oh well.  We went home anyway.  Upon getting home, Sarah discovered my plans for her were to put her to bed for the rest of the day.  Her plans were to finish Barbie, start another movie, persuade me to get her a Happy Meal because that's all her sick tummy could handle, and maybe have me feed her grapes individually.  She soon realized that our plans were unable to coexist, and my plan was sure to prevail.   So she asked if she could, after all, go to school.  I just dropped her off.  And now I have a day at home to get things done for Christmas! 

So my friends, keep watching for more advice.   In this case, all you need is a can of maraschino cherries and you can easily come up with a valid excuse to stay home from work.