Mid baking confession

I have pumpkin shaped sugar cookies in the oven right now and they are due to come out in about 6 minutes.

Somewhere inside I hate to say this. I don't know if I think it makes me a bad mother, or that I wish I were that mother that wouldn't say the following . . .

I HATE MAKING COOKIES WITH MY CHILDREN.

Maybe it's because they are 7 5 and 3. I think if I just had the 7 year old helping, I'd be ok.

And sugar cookies. THEY ARE THE WORST!

I am baking sugar cookies for the ward fall festival tomorrow. I waited until the 1 year old was napping, so I'd have less to deal with.

I had 5 year old help out with the mixing. I did OK with that. She is in charge of turning on the Kitchen Aid when I tell her to, and she does pretty well. It's when she asked to help pour in the ingredients that the tension in my shoulders started. The flour she got MOSTlY in, it was that titch that fell out onto the counter, onto her pants and bit on the floor that made me audibly growl.

But that was OK.

But now, now is the worst part. The rolling out. "mom can I help" and I want to say "Yes dear, just come over here and I'll stand behind you with the rolling pin and you between my arms standing on a chair and we'll roll together". But all I think is . .. "NNNOOOOOOOO PLEASE NOOOOOO". So far I just keep telling them . . in a minute.

While I was trying to get my pumpkins that were slightly sticking to my surface up and to the cookie tray I glanced over and saw 3 year old rolling her slices of lunch meat ham around in the flour residue with my rolling pin. GGGRRRRR.

So I cleaned that up---as much as possible. And told her she was banished. BANISHED. But she hung around and took hand fulls of flour out of my flour jar and spread it on the other half of my clean kitchen island and some on the floor for me to clean up later.

Then, I caught 5 year old licking, and I mean a slobbery kind of lick, the spatula I was using to pry up those cookies that were stuck just a little to my rolling surface. Then out of my mouth came " For Real?? would you want some other kid licking a spatula and then making cookies for us to eat?" And I got a big blank face. She probably would like it. What does she care? Just earlier she had said that she'd clean up the pretzel mess the younger siblings had made while she was at school, by eating them off the floor. and she did.

Well there is the beep. I'm off to roll more dough, and take deep breaths to lower my blood pressure.

And for those of you coming to the ward Fall Festival, I washed the spatula.