California cookie

Every year, the 4th graders do this California cookie project—the parents bake these cookies off of a very basic sugar cookie recipe, cut them out according to a template, and send them in to school, where the kids decorate them to show topography, the different zones of California, where is Sacramento, etc.

The paper with the recipe and template looks like it’s been photocopied a thousand times and they just keep copying it and using it again. The recipe very much makes about 3 Californias, or 2 Californias and a tupperware full of scraps, but I don’t think any of us like, plan ahead and halve the recipe, or team up with another family, or anything like that.

I first met the California cookie when B was in 4th grade, three years ago. We were in the middle of moving from one house to another house, and it was like, two nights before we had to be completely moved out of our old place. We had massively underestimated how much time it would take us to move, and hadn’t prepacked enough—I still have stress dreams about it. This was when we were fully in our DOOM box (“didn’t organize, only moved”) phase. At one point, Drew was driving from the old house to the new with his rear car seats folded down, and dishes just…stacked in the trunk area. Not in boxes. Just little stacks. Just driving really, really slowly.

Thank goodness we just moved a mile away.

On B’s California cookie night, we were under an incredible amount of pressure to get everything out of that house (and then! to clean it!) before our Saturday morning walk through with the landlord. Around 11pm that night, we realized we had to make a California cookie, and we didn’t know where the baking sheets were. Luckily, we found a pizza pan, and things like flour, and I threw together a dough. While it baked, at some point just after midnight, I fell asleep sitting up on the couch.

Oh yeah, and his birthday was also that week, and we were in no shape to do things like…decorate. Or plan anything. We did manage to buy presents. Did we get a cake? I honestly can’t remember.

Eventually we did do our walk through with the landlord (it was awful; I’ll never know why she needed to be like that), and we did unpack cookie sheets, and we did celebrate our son’s subsequent birthdays, and Drew got to put his backseats back up, and I got to sleep in a bed again. But it just all came back to me this week, when H’s class did her California cookie project.

We’ve been in this house for three years; in this city for five years. B had just ended 1st grade when we left the Bay Area; he’s now in middle school. H was four years old; she’s ten now. Time passes and you make cookies and you get a new couch and suddenly your kid is taller than you. Celebrate every day, I guess, and go ahead and eat the cookie scraps.