The task: Supervise three children ages, four, six and nine, for one weekend.
The challenge: Keep them from annoying each other.
The solution: Cookie wars (a spin-off of cupcake wars), puzzle races, lots of time at the park to spend all that youthful energy and use any spare time with chores: taking care of toys and clothes. Planning ahead thwarted some of the youthful energy, but it did not squelch the undercurrent of sibling rivalry. These three want to be noticed as the best.
Cookie wars began with a mutual trip to the grocery store. Each child had an assignment to find brown sugar, oatmeal, chocolate chips or M&Ms. The adult simply had to repeat a couple dozen times, “No, we are not buying that!”
Back at the house, the youngest measured sugars and broke eggs to make Snickerdoodles. The traditional recipe directions to roll the dough balls in cinnamon sugar changed to “roll in sprinkles of all sorts.” This was cookie wars. The cookies had to be different and still tasty.
Rows of hot cookies lined the cooling paper barely long enough to leave a cookie print of oil. Each competitor had to have a taste. If it ruined their lunch, well that is what Grandmother’s do, right?
The middle child absolutely refused to have any nuts in the chocolate chips and really, really wanted both mini-chips and M&MS mixed into the dough … and maybe roll a few dough balls with sprinkles — it might be tasty. The oven yielded more cookies and the lunch-time appetite diminished a bit more with another round of tasting the next kind of cookies.
The oldest child elected to make up oatmeal cookies with extras: coconut, raisins, dried cranberries and nuts.
“Let’s make a really big cookie.” Twenty minutes later half a dozen really big cookies occupied a corner of the cooling paper and topped off everyone’s the room for lunch.
“Let’s go to the park.”
“Okay, grab your shoes, socks and coats.”
Which they promptly abandoned at the park before one weary grandmother drifted off to sleep. After a more health oriented supper, the cookie chefs discussed the merits of each type of cookie with the insistent, persistent question, “Who gets eliminated?”
“I like my chocolate chip cookies with nuts, so that one I guess,” generated a shocked look of disbelief, “Me? I’m eliminated?”
“You did insist on an answer.”
A general clean-up and put-away time preceded bed time.
“I will get all my stuff done before you, boo-yah!”
“Uh-uh,” and the scurry to be first began.
The floors cleared, the clothes disappeared into closets and drawers, the dishes found their proper place. Someone came in first, but no one remembers who.
During a ride around the neighborhood the next day, the trio found a new pirate ship at a different park. “Can we go?”
Again, socks, shoes and jackets promptly fell to the ground as soon as grandma drifted off to sleep after documenting the visit with a camera. And then home, to warm up and endure the interminably long wait for the return of the parents.
“I brought a set of four wooden puzzles I found at a thrift store. Let’s see if they have all the pieces.”
Wooden pieces clacked onto the table. Each piece had a different iconic shape on the back for easy sorting. “I want the circle. I want the square… the diamond, … the triangle.”
The first time everyone sought the straight sides to define the puzzle shape.
Every puzzle had all its pieces.
Switch puzzles and race again to the chant, “I am so good. I will be the first. I will get done first. I am the puzzle champion.”
Well talk is cheap and distracting during a race. The next time less talking and more racing got all the pieces together faster. Let the record show that everyone came in first at least once – even if it meant that some held back pieces and assembled more slowly to make it happen.
Of course, when the parents’ van arrived, they abandoned the puzzle race as blithely as they had their jackets, shoes and socks … and grandma to her long drive home.
Joan Hershberger is a staff writer at the El Dorado News-Times. She can be reached at joanh@everybody.org.