Today I chose a fall/Thanksgiving theme for our cookie baking session: there are pumpkins, three differently shaped leaves, apples, squashes, two turkeys, a horn of plenty and a scarecrow. I love baking with my kids, my son five, and my daughter 11. Well, actually I love watching my kids while they’re in the kitchen baking with me. It’s such an adventure! And while they’re having fun and laughing and generally being kids, they are so focused on the task at hand; their expressions a little bit serious as they concentrate on choosing just the right cookie cutter. 

This is a very important decision: my son especially examines each one carefully, turning it over and over several times before going onto the next one and going through the entire selection process all over again. Since the beginning of our baking adventure, I have reminded them that because there is only one scarecrow, they must share. My daughter is just as serious, but in a different way. She’s not so concerned with picking the right cookie cutter as she is, once she has it in her hands, with placing it vigilantly in the exact center of the piece of dough.

She was four when we purchased the kitchen set for her. I’m amazed that she still plays with it. But when she wants to do some baking in the kitchen with me, and I’m in the middle of something else, or we have to be somewhere before the cookies would be done, she goes off to play in her own kitchen. After my son came along and he grew old enough to follow his sister around, he insisted on playing with her in the kitchen. It’s well stocked with pots, pans and dishes, a coffee maker and even a blender. When she’s in the mood, she even teaches her little brother how to bake the way mom does.

I am terrified of the time when my daughter won’t want to join my son and me for a baking session in the kitchen; when baking with her mom will be boring, not cool or just plain dumb. But for today, I laugh with her as she attentively blobs too much orange icing onto a pumpkin sugar cookie.

Lisa, mom of a son (5) and a daughter (11)