Toss Those Cookies!

We have a new friend at our house, a little blond neighbor girl.  Her name is confidential because she is a minor (I'm laughing at myself), but in keeping with our alphabetical pseudonyms, we'll call her Babby.  Her mom is going to college, so we get to play with her a couple of afternoons  week.

When Babby first started coming to play, she and Angel would shut themselves in the bedroom and not let the twins in to play.  No, not all the time, but occasionally.  I found it hilarious that Freddie and Georgie would wander around complaining in sad voices that there was no one to play with.  Really?  You are twins!  You always have a built-in-buddy to play with!  But Angel was such a good organizer of play that they felt lost without her.  Over the past few months, they have gotten used to playing with each other, and they enjoy it.  It's good practice for when Angel starts kindergarten in the fall.

Angel and Babby took a little dance class together last fall, and were just cute.  Babby is a great little dancer, and I was hoping that Angel would learn some grace.  Our girl dances like a boy - feet planted, hands balled into fists, and hips shifting back and forth mechanically.  But no, a dance class did not give her a smooth dancing rhythm.  Oh well.  They did have a good time together, though.

And they are as adorable as any little girls out there when they wore their pink tutus and curled hair for their dance recital.  Dutiful parent that I was, I made them sit still for the hot curling iron and nasty hair spray, and then took pictures.  That's what we do.

Today, we made chocolate chip cookies.  There were supposed to be consumed in the middle of the night yesterday (early this morning?) while we watched the lunar eclipse, but they somehow did not get themselves baked.  Bad cookies.  Don't you know that the longer you remain in dough form, the more I will eat of you? The eclipse was still amazing without them, especially since Trent made up hot chocolate for us.  Good man.

I didn't know this was possible, but Babby prefers her cookies without chocolate chips.  I'm game for that, and I found some dough at the bottom of the bowl that didn't have as many chips mixed into it.  There's usually some unmixed flour and baking soda down there too.  I'm a great cook.  I picked out a few stray chocolate chips, rolled the dough into balls, and put them on a little plate.  They missed the bus into the oven with all the other cookie dough balls, so I thought I'd microwave them.  I'd had such good success with my microwave muffins, after all.

These cookies cooked in ten minutes in the oven, so I figured that two minutes in the microwave would be plenty.  After one minute, I stopped the microwave when smoke started curling out of its door.  The cookies were badly and un-fixably burnt.  And the smell!  Worse than burnt popcorn, but not as bad as the hair I used to pull out and toast over the open flame in my junior high science class.  Burnt hair is bad.  Oh, so bad.

We turned on the fan and opened windows and doors.  All we could do next was to take the burnt offerings and throw them in the chicken bucket where we put all out scraps.  And take the bucket outside.  Blech.  Toss those cookies, baby.  It took me several more batches of good oven-baked cookies to cover up the smoky nastiness.  But now we have cookies!

And Babby ate the warm chocolate chips cookies anyway.  With the chips.