My mom tells this story about one afternoon when I was little, baking with my grandmother, Sweetie. I honestly have almost zero memories of my grandmother that don’t involve her cooking or baking. There was one time I remember her yelling at my cousin Kimmy for dropping and exploding an entire gallon of milk inside our front door… but even that involved food.
Anyway. So Sweetie and I are baking cookies. I remember we would make these cookies with cinnamon and sugar that were little round pinwheels. I think we called them snails… appetizing, right? So she’s holding this big knife that she’s been cutting dough with and she turns to little three-year-old me and says, “Jaimie, let’s bake your hand.” And of course I look bravely horrified as I hide my chubby little hand behind my back and use my best, stranger-approaching-in-a-dark-parking-garage, “No!”
She was appropriately, mirthfully, apologetic.
Turns out there was a family tradition of taking the extra dough, tracing my hand with a knife, sprinkling it with cinnamon and sugar and then baking it into a sweet little hand cookie.
Meanwhile, as I’ve mentioned, Nate has a mouthful of treasure and is in complete Jack-O-Lantern mode, just in time for Halloween. His one front tooth seems to have migrated front and center, and perceptibly lower than the rest.
A couple of week back, we were all chatting around the dinner table, confounded that Nate had already spent his Tooth Fairy two-dollar bill on an after school sno-cone. In any case, he’s really been struggling to eat just about everything. We were having ribs for dinner which is really one of James’ specialties. James is up for challenging just about anyone to a rib cook-off. Do you hear me Bobby Flay?
So we’ve spent the majority of dinner talking about Nate’s dental situation when he refuses to eat his ribs. I suspect a combination of not wanting to get his hands sticky, and it being a challenging meal for a little one-toothed beaver.
I get up from the table and say offhandedly, “Just wait a second and I’ll cut it off.”
Nate’s eyes get as big as saucers and he exclaims in his best, grandmother-approaching-with-a-large-knife, “No!”