>A few weeks ago, when Dave caught Luke and I whispering about April Fools Day, he put in a polite request that I not make meatloaf and mashed potato cupcakes again. I was happy to oblige.

I had read about a trick that I wanted to play on Luke, and then he flipped through my magazine and saw the trick and he wanted to play it on Dave. I figured Luke would forget, and he did, so I tricked him and then he and I tricked Dave. The trick: Put a drop of food coloring in the bottom of a cereal bowl. Add cereal. Then when you add the milk, it turns a crazy color. I went with blue for Luke and red for Dave:

From April Fools

Then, after school, we made a spaghetti dinner and a spaghetti and meatball dessert:

From April Fools

From April Fools

Luke insisted on having both types of spaghetti on his plate at the same time and he wanted to eat the spaghetti cupcakes first, but we managed to talk some sense into him.

From April Fools

After dinner I had to run out to the school for the school improvement team meeting. Before I left I whispered into Dave’s ear, “I short-sheeted Luke’s bed. So make sure he doesn’t just get under the comforter.” I wish I had a picture of the look that Dave gave me. I was something along the lines of, “What the heck is wrong with you?” But about 2 seconds later, Luke said, “Mom! Remember that you were going to play more tricks on me. When are you going to do that? You have more tricks planned, right?” That continued right up to until he couldn’t straighten out his legs once he got into bed. Ha! Got him.

In other news, here is Luke’s leaning tower of snowman right before we got another 4 inches of snow:

From April Fools

>I bought Hello Cupcake this year with a Christmas gift certificate, and I am on my third creation. The first was simple, and the second wasn’t worth photographing. The third, and the reason I bought the book, turned out quite well:

And it was easy. All I had to do was bake the muffins, and then have my father in law cut mini donuts in half, my sister in law cut starburst and chocolate cookies, my mother in law cup up marshmallows while I iced everything together. Then after the last layer of icing, my sister in law and mother in law helped me assemble all the pieces. Then we spent about 20 minutes figuring how to transport them to school. Huge success! They were devoured in under 5 minutes.

Thanks for your help, family!

>I have sent a lot of cookies to a lot of people over the last several years, and the recipients always say, “thanks” and “they were delicious” but I always wonder if they mean it. I mean, what else are you going to say to someone who baked you an assorted variety of Christmas cookies, then lovingly packaged and shipped them? “Um, they aren’t as good as store bought” or “They were a little stale” or “Well, they were broken into a million crumbs, but I ate them over ice cream”?

I thought I solved the problem of wondering how they taste by trying to slowly eat all the cookies that I didn’t send over the course of 5 days and noting any change in freshness or deliciousness. But that process does not take into account the shaking of the box, temperature fluctuations, or as Laura pointed out yesterday, the amount of exhaust the cookies would absorb.

So this year, after I sent Dave off to the shipping store, I was thinking about the whole thing all over again. Do people like to get cookies in the mail? I think I have received cookies in the mail twice and Bean is the only one who knows how the first set turned out. The second set were professionally made and were part of a miscarriage related care package, so they were delicious, but tinged with grief.

And so, and so, and so. So I thought, “Maybe I should ship some cookies to myself and see how they taste when they get here.” This thought was dismissed after about 5 seconds of contemplation because, “only a crazy person would ship cookies to themselves to see how they taste. Right?” and “that seems like a lot of work.”

Then I checked voice mail the other day, for the first time in several weeks apparently, and I found out that the cookies I had shipped to my cousins girlfriend, who I have in the handmade-gift exchange, did not receive her cookies because they had been returned to sender. So two days later, I finally made it to the package store to pick them up and when the guy handed me the box I said, perhaps a little too excitedly, “well, now we have a box of cookies to eat! And we can see if they still taste good!” I was talking to Luke, but the guy at the counter said, “Wow. Way to find a silver lining.”

So the cookies were pretty much as good as they were when I sent them, so I still don’t really know if the cookies are as good as they are in my mind, but they weathered their travels to Cleveland and back pretty well. Some were a little stale, but my instructions say specifically to dunk them in milk or coffee if they are stale, so that solves that problem.

And all I had to do was think, maybe I should ship some cookies to myself, and poof! It happened! Well, I had to make the wish and transpose a 9 and a 2, but you get the idea. This is not the first sort of lame wish I have made that has come true.

New Years Resolution Number 1: Start wishing for cooler things!