The Last of the Tenth Birthdays

This weekend is going to be huge. This whole year is going to be huge, really. All the kids have managed to place milestone birthdays in the same year. My baby turns ten on Sunday. Double digits. My baby. The brain has a hard time processing that. And next weekend, the lone princess will be 18. STOP THE TRAIN. Josh will be 16 this summer, the nephew 18, and Luke 13. See? All big years. The party budget is going to break us. Clearly this was not good family planning on our part.

Of course, I needed to send cupcakes to school with Micah since every kid needs to celebrate their birthday with their classmates. Becky and I went to the store today to find magical things to help us make this happen. While at the store, looking at all the magical things, I decided that cookies would be so much easier to transport to the school than cupcakes. Sugar cookies. Decorated like pirates. Because that would be awesome. I bought the magical things I needed to make pirate cookies happen.

I also bought cold meds, because this cold is just kicking me. I kind of really suck at choosing medications, which is why it's Sam's job to do this. But because I was desperate, I carefully read boxes, looking for the symptoms that I needed fixed. Bingo. Alka Seltzer Cold Plus was the winner, and I knew we had Alka Seltzer before because I'd taken the last pill in the box two days before. It was a good one. Except it wasn't, because when I got home and went to medicate myself, I realized that I got fizz-in-the-cup Alka Seltzer. Dude. That stuff is wicked nasty. And also works wonders. I'm pretty sure it fizzed out my entire nasal cavity. For the first time in over two weeks, I could kinda sorta breathe. And I almost stopped coughing.

I looked up sugar cookie recipes. I didn't have that ingredient for that recipe. This recipe needed refrigerated overnight before it was to be rolled out. All the other recipes were variations of the first two. Sugar cookies weren't going to be as easy as I thought they would be. While getting all the magical things, I forgot actual ingredients.

The dogs needed out. I looked for recipes. The dogs needed in. Jack was wet. Why would he roll in wet snow? Silly dog. I looked for recipes. Jack smelled like a wet dog. Sheesh, even his back was wet. And that's when a faint light bulb started flickering. I put on my shoes and headed out to the pond. Yep, sure enough, there were dog tracks leading right up to the pond, the ice broken and stirred sufficiently, and tracks leading out the other side of the pond. Jack took a swim in February, and was clearly none the worse for his quick dip. Smelly, but just fine.

I scratched the sugar cookie plan and went with Plan C. Oversized outrageous chocolate chip cookies. Because great big huge cookies are awesome for kids. I doubled the recipe so that we'd have a few left over to eat after making extra large cookies for the entire class. Thank goodness I doubled the recipe. The big scoop I had, that I hoped would make huge cookies, didn't. They were just slightly larger than normal. And after making enough not-huge cookies for the class, we had just enough for the family to each have one left over. Fail.

And then I dropped the container of cookies and broke several. Because it's that kind of day. But the shirt I made for Micah to wear to school tomorrow for his 10th birthday (that isn't until Sunday) turned out just as epic as I'd hoped it would. There's that one positive. But the day wasn't horrible. We spent the evening looking through old photos. Gosh, the fun.

Behold, my baby. Who's about to turn 10.


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