Epic Fail

Knock-Off Oreos

I just can't seem to get things right lately.  This week, for instance,
I wanted to make the above-pictured cookies for my cookie business, since Bee really wanted to try homemade Oreos.  I got the recipe from here.  Mixing the ingredients was easy-enough, but I spent literally 10 minutes with the beater blasting, trying to get the ingredients to turn from a sandy pile to a cohesive dough.  Ten minutes is a long time to have the beaters screaming in your ear; particularly when your child is concurrently screaming from the living room because he can't hear his movie.

My ingredients did finally 'dough', but then I used a tremendous amount of energy trying to roll them into 1/8"-thick sheets.  By the time I was done rolling, I was exhausted, and I hadn't even cut out the shapes.

To make a long story slightly shorter, trying to remove the baked cookies from their trays resulted in this:

I got very few sandwiches, and -- instead -- a LOT of crumbs and broken cookies.

Fearing I now wouldn't have enough cookies for this week's selection, I now had to make something else (because I wasn't about to make yet-another batch of these Oreos).  I chose a bar cookie, since they're less work, then proceeded to spend 20 minutes with sticky dough stuck all over my hands while I tried to "pat" the dough into the bottom of my baking dishes.

I just don't know what's wrong with my baking today.

To add insult to injury, I went back to frosting what few good Oreos I had while the bar cookies were baking, only to discover that I did indeed have enough Oreos for this week's baking, after all, and fumbling my way through the bar cookies was unnecessary.  Though, I suspect, the bar cookies will be delicious . . . plus Bee will be thrilled to have the entire batch of Oreos.

Let's see; how else have I screwed up recently?  Oh, right: there's the slight fact that -- after sitting on my lazy ass aaallllllll winter -- I finally felt compelled to contribute to our family's subsistence and tried working in the shop a couple of times last week.  And promptly broke two of Bee's machines.  Now -- mind you -- it may not have been my fault that they broke; it might just be coincidence that they broke on my watch.  Still, the point is that Bee had the machines for over a decade, and they decided to break when I was around. 

Which really tells you that I ought to just go back to sitting on my ass and not contributing to our family's subsistence.

Of course, just sitting on my ass has caused some screw-ups, too: I've gotten too lazy to get up with my child.  Well, really, it's his fault: Mr. C used to be such a great sleeper, staying quietly in his room until 9 in the morning.  Within the last few months, however, he's suddenly decided to start waking up at the ungodly hour of 7:30.  In the morning.  Can you believe it??

Since we're too lazy to get up with him, Bee and I have now trained Mr. C to either go downstairs and plug himself into the TV or get online and play computer games until we get up. 

Yeah, yeah: boo, hiss, I'm a bad mom.

It might not be so bad if it was just a Saturday morning routine, but we're talkin' every day here.

However, despite my efforts to be the worst mom ever, I have to admit that my child is actually getting something out of these computer games.  For instance, the other day he typed his entire first name into a game: he still can't write it by hand, but I was just so thrilled that he at least recognized the letters and knows where they go.  And this morning I caught him playing a Dora The Explorer game that had him deciding which item came next in a pattern.  Seeing as how he refused to complete a similar activity on good old-fashioned-paper the other week, I was so frickin' proud of him finding the next pattern on his own that I rationalized that it was OK for him to play another half-hour on the computer (while I sat on my ass on the couch).

You know what I think the worst part about being a parent is?  It's the constant need to figure out how much is too much.  Can he have a cookie if he's already had a sucker and a piece of chocolate?  Should he watch a movie if he's already played on the computer for an hour this morning?  If he had X amount of veggies at lunch, can he skip them at dinner?

And I know all the "child experts" out there claim to have answers to all these questions . . . but their answers are just too inconvenient for my lazy ass.

I know I'm a little whiny.  I blame it on a lack of sleep: Mr. C suddenly got sick last night, and once again felt the need to wake up coughing and SCREAMING at 2:30 (in the morning), which he then followed by 10 minutes jumping around the bathroom SCREAMING and 5 more minutes in his bedroom SCREAMING.  For no really good reason.  I swear, that child has suddenly turned into a drama queen.

The good news about his sickness is that I haven't felt guilty about letting him lie on the couch all day today, watching movies.

See?  You can't accuse me of never looking for the positive in every situation.