What A Mess!

Blobs of bright blue frosting were smeared across Beth’s (3) cheeks.  Her fingers were caked with pink and purple sprinkles.  She looked up at me and gave me her “look what I can do” smile just before she plunged her palms into the bowl of nonpareils.  She squished her hands together and then lapped the tasty embellishments off her fingers. I noticed smudges of sugar stuck to her wispy brown hair and dabbed behind her right ear.

It wasn’t just Beth.  Emily (5) had been piling a mountain of pink frosting onto a small star shaped cooking.  I found my self thinking, "How does one get icing on one's socks?" She looked like a volcano that had spewed pink lava all over her dress.   Even Eric (8), who was often more careful in his creations, was licking globs of sugar off the back of his hands and wrists.  

The tabletop was a rainbow of frosting - yellow, red, green and blue.  The floor was dusted with jimmies and sprinkles.  A spoonful of purple goo lay next to Beth’s chair.  And I had just stepped on a half eaten cookie that Emily had knocked to the floor.

I groaned.  What a mess!

When I had planned our family cookie making evening, the picture in my head was much different.  In my imagination, Ken and I were sitting quietly in the kitchen helping the girls outline sugar cookie angels with decorating gel.  I had pictured Eric humming “Jingle Bells” as he dabbed tiny red icing dots onto a tree shaped cookie.  In my vision, the room was calm, quiet, and most important, clean, just like a scene from a movie or on TV.

As usual, my reality turned out to be a bit more frenzied than my visualization.  I suppose my selective memory, the same one I used for vacations, had kicked in and I had forgotten how messy this project had been last year...and the year before that....and the year before that.  It was worse than an evening playing with Play Dough.

I hadn’t factored in the inevitable spills or the arguments over who gets to use the pink icing first.  I had miscalculated the number of paper towels I would need - apparently, ten rolls was not enough.  I had forgotten to line every surface in the kitchen with newspaper to protect against the certain destruction that accompanies most projects in our house. And I had completely discounted the chaos coefficient.

Maybe decorating cookies wasn’t such a good idea, I thought.  Maybe we should have bought Santa a box of Oreos instead.  Maybe we should skip this activity next year.   

I was just about ready to dump everything in the trashcan and chase the crowd from the kitchen when I noticed Emily.  She had been sitting quietly in her chair for almost five minutes heaping icing onto her cookie.  She was smiling.

“Mommy.” She grinned. “Look at my cookie.  It’s beautiful.”

I leaned over Emily’s chair and hugged her around the neck. “It is beautiful, Honey Bee.” I whispered.  “And so are you.”