Baking Cookies with Toddlers

Or: Lessons in futility

What is productivity when you are a stay at home parent with two small children? It looks pretty different than my days in a cubicle, when it was all about getting work done between meetings and trying to intuit the unspoken priorities of my bosses (when everything is urgent, what is actually urgent?). 

My bosses often seemed disappointed with my work, but they never cried over my using a red folder instead of a blue folder when routing the paperwork for signatures. And they didn’t agree with each other but they certainly didn’t wrestle for the last cookie. 

So it is hard to understand the simultaneous low urgency that is baking cookies at home with two kids - Q2 earnings will not be affected by whether we make snickerdoodle or chocolate chip. No one’s bonus is riding on how much dough is eaten before the cookies actually get baked. 

Except that is a terrible example because whole arguments are had on parenting boards about who is more horrible - a mother that denies her child the childhood tradition of salmonella risk, or the mother who clearly doesn’t care about her children at all if she is going to let them eat raw eggs.

We also never worried about salmonella when I worked in publishing. 

Anyway, my point is, how is it both completely irrelevant to the world whether or not we make cookies together, and yet the process of baking with two small children is the stress level of diffusing a bomb.  

The arguments over who gets to measure the next ingredient are loud and frequent. I struggle with the difficulty of assigning simultaneous tasks to the two boys while I manage the other steps that they can’t do, while also NOT bringing attention to those steps because then someone will cry that THEY can’t melt the butter on the stove. I always drop the Costco-sized parchment paper roll on my foot because it’s on the high shelf and the kids have the two stools, so I resort to jumping. Maybe that is why that shelf is a precarious Jenga stack of boxes, because afterwards I will throw it on top of the pile. 

I have to sprint down to the basement for more flour and hope I don’t come up to find the baking soda all over the floor. Nope, it was the brown sugar today. I don’t have time to sweep because the kids are arguing again and it’s time to set them up with spoons on the other counter that almost has enough space for a sheet pan. 

Don’t push your brother off the stool! You can both work at the counter. 

I know you brother pushed you, but you don’t need to push him back.

The cookies go into the oven and immediately the kids are asking if the cookies are ready yet. I send them outside so I can just have all the loud sounds stop for one minute. And then I look at the kitchen.

When the timer goes off in 12 minutes I have just found all the lids to the containers. How do children make lids disappear so quickly? I tell them every time to put the lid back on the cinnamon once you are done measuring, and yet it takes me a full 5 minutes to find where the lid landed on the floor. I put the last items away and turn around to find the kids kneeling at the oven door, hands cupped around their eyes so they can watch the cookies bake. Until they start wrestling for the “best” view.