Weekends with Hannah

Just before leaving work on Friday, I got a phone call and on the other end of the line was this little, sweet, angelic voice "Um... Aunt Mariko, do you think I can spend the night with you?" How can I say no? After checking with Uncle Fernando, I picked up Hannah on my way home. Hannah is tender hearted, loves affection, an animal whiz and LOVES- yes, loves sugar. Needless to say our big project this weekend was to make sugar cookies and decorate them.

http://recipes.pauladeen.com/index.php/recipesviewmonogrammed_sugar_cookies/

Friday night, we spent a couple hours making 2 batches of "Paula Deen's" sugar cookies- 1 red and 1 green. Hannah learned to measure ingredients, sift, and mix. I'm still cleaning my counter. :) Well, God bless Paula, but I'm not down with this recipe. I just figured with all that work, we'd get the 5 dozen cookies per batch like it said we would. We might have gotten 4 even after doubling the recipe. Que sera! Hannah was in hog heaven needless to say and I must have heard, "Oooh, can I lick that?" eleventy billion times, but it was totally worth it. We put the dough in the fridge to chill over night and watched several episodes of "The Barefoot Contessa" on the dvr.


Chewy adores Hannah 99% of the time unless he's being a brat. He even ditches ME to instead sleep next to her. I don't mind a bit really, I love the idea of him "protecting" her while she sleeps. So cute. This was the first thing I saw this morning when I got up....


We got dressed and headed to the office where she was patient for the most part. I only work half shifts on Saturdays so I don't mind bringing the girls with me when they stay the weekends. After getting home, we began rolling out our cookies and cutting our shapes. Yikes. After seeing the first batch come out, I decided we'd be better off just rolling dough balls.

Ok, so I'm a bit of a control freak though I really do try and let it go at times. I gave Hannah a nice chunk of dough to play with, cut out shapes, stick up her nose or whatever while I made ball after ball after ball. That didn't last very long and soon it was a nice crumbly mess.


She did let me know however, that it still "tasted real good!" even with the additional 2 pounds of flour. She got bored and took a break while I finished baking the rest of our perfectly round cookies. After they cooled a bit, it was time to decorate!


I gave Hannah one frosting bag and I took the other. She managed to decorate her's pretty quickly if I do say so myself. I went for the whimsical look, but not sure I got there. Oh well, they're pretty darn tasty all the same.


Shortly after the cookie project was completed, I decided I'd had enough "entertaining" for the weekend. Ahhhh... the joys of being an aunt- I just give them back! Gotta love the kiddies!