Girlie

My niece just took her longest road trip to date, to our house.

We had a sip-and-see at our house on Saturday morning for Casey’s Houston area friends to come meet her baby.  There was plenty of ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the little Carolena. 

We embraced her girlie-ness and made a “sugar and spice and everything nice” centerpiece.  It was a little disconcerting to walk around my house to look for “everything nice” and not come up with anything.  I considered a purple dinosaur for awhile, then contemplated just tossing a jumble of bras on the table.   Besides some birds I put out around Easter, we’re lacking on feminine knick-knacks.  It’s apparently time for me to re-embrace my femininity.  I live most of my life in the bottom half of the following picture:

Here’s my love letter to Carolena:  sifting three cups of powdered sugar with a broken sifter to make sugar cookies with her initials.  I always forget how tedious sifting is until I have to do it.  And actually Carolena, I think my mom finally took over and finished the sifting for me.  That’s just more love poured into those cookies for you.

Magazines make it look so easy, constantly peddling their royal icing holiday sugar cookie recipes.  Real life involved sweating and yelling and enlisting every available adult to help with the cookies before the frosting hardened.

And I want to know if at some point a professional baker stops ending every batch of frosted cookies like this:

Hopefully not.  I want to imagine bakeries with glass cases full of perfect cookies and bakers standing in the back shoving the leftover icing cookies into their mouths.

Well, that’s as far as I’m going to get summing up the weekend, other than to squeeze in the fact that my mom, for the first time, had all three of her grandchildren together.  But that’s it.  I’m out.  I have two boys waking up way to early from their naps, both crying.  Duty calls.