On Monday evening my mom came to spend the night and then stay with the three younger kids while I took Yo-Yo to his routine doctor’s appointment in the big city the next day.

I could sure get used to having a live-in nanny. Skipping off to a doctor’s appointment is practically effortless when I can leave the house with everyone still in their jammies. When I got back, Sweetsie’s room was all fixed up (my mother likes to pretend she’s Ram Dass in A Little Princess, trucking in little pretties to fluff up the kids’ [and grownups’] nests—and you know what? If she had a monkey on her shoulder, there wouldn’t be any way to tell the two of them apart), chores done, books read, and kids in jolly-fine spirits.

Maybe we need to quick turn Amish and build a Daudy house.

And then she up and took the two olders home with her so now, with a 50 percent reduction in my work load, I’m feeling right footloose and fancy-free.

This morning I played a couple card games with the kids and then shooed them off to play. Cookies were on my agenda (again) and I didn’t want any grabby fingers meddling.

“Can we have a tea party?” Sweetsie asked. “With gingerbread and water and little glasses?”

“No,” I said, eager to get to my work. But then I conceded just a little, “I’ll think about it. Now run along.”

By the time I greased my cookie sheets and started rolling the peanut butter dough into balls, the two littles were immersed in a game of make believe. They had back packs and books, play food was stuffed in an unplugged toaster oven, and they were vigorously bossing each other around.

Normally when the kids play like so, I don’t touch them with a ten-foot pole. There is no way I want to draw attention away from their game and towards myself. But today, with the bigs being gone and a lazy day stretched out in front of me, I got an uncommon urge, an urge to charm the socks off my kids.

So. While they were all a-bustle over by the dress-up box, I slipped the cookie dough back into the fridge, put some water on to boil, fetched three little mugs from the hutch, spread a red-checked cloth on the kitchen floor, and set the “table” with napkins, spoons, and the bowl of sugar that originally was intended for the dough balls.

The red raspberry tea set to steeping, I approached their school/house/store and rapped on the wall. Without even turning to look at me, Sweetsie called out, Come in!

“I was wondering if you guys would like to come to my house for tea?”

“Well, sure,” they said agreeably.

“You could come over right now or in a little bit,” I said, not wanting to be bossy.

“Um, okay,” Sweetsie said. “In a little bit.”

And so I returned to my kitchen to sit on the floor and await for my guests.

In short order they arrived. Backpacks were shed, cookies devoured, tea stirred and sipped, and when a guest’s full glass went tippy-oh, I, feeling very Mary Poppinesque, didn’t even bother to clean it up. Instead, I laughed and benevolently offered a refill.

The pot of tea emptied, my guests offered many thanks before carrying there sugar-bottomed cups to the sink and heading back to school/home/the store. And I, my urge to charm appeased, tossed the cloth in the wash, pulled the bowl of dough back out of the fridge, and commenced to bake up a storm.

A couple hours later at lunch: the Baby Nickel was fully engrossed in spreading his grape jelly all the way to the edges of his toast when out of the blue he heartily declared, “Thanks for having that tea party, Mom. It was fun!”

And just like that, the socks were charmed right off me.

Peanut Butter Cookies
Adapted from The All-American Cookie Book by Nancy Baggett

There are lots of peanut butter cookie recipes out there but I have yet to find a better one. These are classic. Crunchy around the edges, chewy in the middle, and perfectly peanut-buttery.

3/4 cup (1 ½ sticks) butter
3/4 cup white sugar, plus extra for rolling
1 cup packed brown sugar
3 tablespoons flavorless oil (I used canola) or peanut oil
2 eggs
2 ½ teaspoons vanilla
1 1/4 cups peanut butter (creamy or chunky)
2 1/4 cups flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt, scant

Cream together the butter, oil, and sugars. Beat in the eggs and vanilla and then the peanut butter. Add the dry ingredients and mix until combined. Chill the dough for a couple hours. (It will keep for several days in the fridge, and it freezes well, too.)

Shape the dough into balls (about 1-inch in diameter). Lightly grease your baking sheets.

For classic crissscross cookies:
Set the balls on the cookie sheets and, using a fork, press down one way and then the other to make a checkerboard pattern. To keep the dough from sticking to the fork, dip it into some granulated sugar between presses.

Bake the cookies at 350 degrees for 8-12 minutes or until they are slightly golden brown at the edges but still soft in the middle. Take care not to overbake.

For peanut butter blossoms:
Roll the balls of dough in a bowl of granulated sugar. Set the balls on the cookie sheets and bake at 350 degrees for 8-12 minutes, or until the tops are beginning to crack. Remove the cookies from the oven and press a Hershey’s kiss into the top of each cookie. After allowing the cookies to set up for a couple minutes, transfer them to a cooling rack. Wait to bag up the cookies till they are totally cool and the chocolate has set.

My own version:
Confession: I don’t like Hershey’s kisses in my peanut butter cookies. It’s too much chocolate per mouthful, plus the kisses often end up falling off somewhere between the freezer and the cookie platter. Therefore, I’ve come up with my own little version: Wilber dark chocolate disks. Instead of pressing a kiss into each baked cookie, I press in one of those little disks. Then, just for pretty, while the chocolate is all soft and creamy-dreamy, I drop one Ghirardelli white chocolate chip on top.

Note: if you want less crinkly cookie edges, smash the sugar-rolled balls down a little using the smooth bottom of a drinking glass. I did it both ways this morning and while I think I like the crinkly look best, you just may prefer the other.

This same time, years previous: Ree’s Monkey Bread and Butter Cookies

I have a lot of balls in the air right now. Other people (my husband included) might say (or snap) that it’s too many, but I can’t quite bring myself to put it in such negative terms. I’m having fun, buzzing from activity to activity, trying to keep up with myself. It feels good.

It feels like a lot, too.

Take today, for example. There was cookie baking in the morning. I mixed up a double batch of peanut butter cookie dough, baked lemon sweetie pies, baked a freaking multitude of gingerbread men (to be decorated later), and started some anise-fig-date swirls that I couldn’t finish because I have no anise in the house—duh. I baked bread and mixed up another batch. I served three little munchkins some lunch. I planned supper (for the curious among you: honey-baked chicken, rice, brussel sprouts, a fennel-cabbage-carrot slaw). Now, the kitchen cleaned up and the kids resting, I’m tapping away at my keyboard, getting some much-craved writing time.

(Large bunny trail: when I type, I pound on my laptop keys, which irks Mr. Handsome to no end. My kids, on the other hand, touch the keys so gently you can hardly even tell they are pressing down. Their approach to the keyboard is so totally different from me and my loud tap-whacks that I’ve come up with a theory: I was trained to attack the bloomin’ keyboard because I learned to type on a manual typewriter. You’re familiar with those old, clunky heirlooms, right? The kind where you have to bear down with your whole upper body to get the keys to go down, and with each strike your finger nearly disappears into the bowels of the machine entirely? [That I attack all areas of my life like they need to be conquered is neither relevant NOR up for discussion.] Does this theory of mine hold any water? O, ye of the manual typewriter era, enlighten me, please. Do you pound your words into life? Or is it just me?)

(And, by the way, I’m looking for one or two of those old typewriters. I think they’d make excellent, and useful, toys.)

Now, after writing this afternoon (and drinking coffee and eating chocolate), I’ll need to do some more cooking (that supper I mentioned won’t just make itself) and perhaps do a little jewelry-making. And then I’m off to town to run errands and go to a belly dance class.

Other things that aren’t as visible but that still take up mind space (and time!):
*a novel I’m itching to dive into
*a friend’s phone call and interview of me and then the subsequent article that made me laugh so hard I about peed myself (she beautifully encapsulated my random energy and blabbermouth ways and still managed to flatter me, bless her)
*belly dance workouts in my kitchen
*emails/correspondence/phone calls
*photography (got some books from the library, gonna teach myself some skeels)
*Christmas decorating (because Sweetsie is fussing that everyone else is having Christmas except for us)

See what I mean? It’s a lot of stuff and all of it fun and I don’t know which way to turn. (Except away from the dust and laundry and sticky floors—I’m pretty good at turning away from those.)

So what do you think I did last night when we finally got the kids trundled off to bed and I had a blissfully free evening stretched out before me? I went from sitting in front of the fire to laying in front of the fire, my reading material, unopened, sitting heavy a-top on my chest. The heat, my sore neck (must have slept on it wrong), the silence, they all conspired against me and shipped me off to la-la land.

Which wasn’t a bad thing, because falling asleep in front of the fire is a perfectly seasonal activity, one that should’ve been on the above list all along.

Signed,
Miss Zippy (who occasionally zonks out)

This same time, years previous: baked corn and play areas, scorpions and ritual cleansings

Last night when I was tucking Miss Beccaboo in for bed, she showed me her newly outfitted Anne of Green Gables doll.

She had altered a Barbie doll dress to fit Little Anne.

She proudly showed me how she hemmed it and how the extra length of dress fabric could be used as a shawl.

This morning I took my camera up to her room to document her seamstress abilities (which already far exceed those of my own). While I was up there, I snapped some pictures of her one-of-a-kind decor. It shows you how her mind works, I think.

Behold! A vandalized night-light house with a Santa atop the roof:

Stickered fish swimming in the Atlantic Ocean:

A bridled porcelain duck:

A plastic spider patrolling the bookshelves:

Someone recently asked me if Miss Beccaboo likes to draw. After thinking about it for a minute, I was mildly surprised to realize the answer was no. A couple days later I found out just how right I was when I happened to ask her to draw something and she burst into tears and loudly expressed her hatred of drawing.

She’s a textile girl all the way, that child is. And she loves her fabric.

Which is too bad for her since I detest sewing as much as she detests drawing. Perhaps it’s time for me to barter some sewing lessons for her.

And then I went into her sister’s room and found this bear staring at me.

My kids are weird.

When I came downstairs from my little photo tour, I found the three youngest playing cards in the bathroom: Miss Beccaboo on the lidded toilet seat, Sweetsie on a kitchen chair, and The Baby Nickel on the floor.

“Why are you playing cards in the bathroom?” I asked.

“Because I had to go to the bathroom,” Miss Beccaboo informed me.

My kids really are weird.

This same time, years previous: the selfish game