Helpin' Mama

We're heading out to Benjy's parents' house tomorrow for the family campout at the grandparents' home. Cousins from Idaho, the Carolinas, northern Ohio, and PA will be gathering for the holiday weekend. Benjy's mom is in charge of the meal on Saturday evening for around 70 people, so she asked if I could make some cookies or bars for desert. We settled on this Lemon Sandwich Cookie http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/lemon-sandwich-cookies. They are delicious, but were an absolute pain to make. At any rate, we have eleventy-seven cookies in the freezer to take with us. Mercy loves to help, so I let her stand on a chair and help me cut out the cookies. She kept saying "Help Mama!" over and over while she was breaking off chunks of dough to eat, sticking her finger THROUGH the cookie cutter and putting finger marks in the dough, and generally making a mess. When Benj came into the kitchen, she said earnestly "Help Mama. Fingers icky!" Well, yeah, that happens when you eat handfuls of dough. And sometimes, she really does help, like this morning when we were making coconut flour pancakes. She mixed the oil, eggs, vanilla, and cream without spilling a drop:

But, as it turns out, Baby Girl is a chef after her mama's own heart. It seems that her favorite part of cooking...

....Is eating.

And what was Little Man doing during all this, you might ask? Well, usually something like dragging a rotten onion from the depths of the potato bin in the pantry:

But this time :

That's right, folks. Photographic evidence that the boy does, ocassionally, sleep. Sometimes for as long as 20 minutes.

And yes, I do allow my children to run around naked, except for a diaper because it makes less laundry for me it gets warm in their rooms when the doors are closed for naps and bedtime.