Cooking with Kids

I went to a cookie exchange this afternoon, so I baked some cookies this morning...with two kids "helping." Why do I put myself through such torture? Here's a rundown of some of the events:

• Claire was stirring the sugar and brown sugar in a bowl--just the two ingredients, mind you, nothing else. "Whoopsies," I heard her say. I looked over and there was a slight powdering of sugar on the counter. She had flipped some out as she was stirring it, which is fairly normal for a child to do. But it got me wondering, "How does one learn to keep the contents in the bowl while stirring? How do you teach that skill? At what age does it happen?"
  
• We added the flour and other dry ingredients to the bowl. While I was getting something out of the pantry, I heard a gasp and looked over to see Claire covering her mouth with a pained look on her face. I thought she had bitten her tongue, but then realized she had flipped flour onto the counter. "Why am I even using a bowl?" I thought to myself. "I might as well just dump the ingredients on to the counter and mix it all right there. At this rate, as long as she's consistent with her flipping, I'll have half the dough mixed on the counter and the other half in the bowl."
  
• Xander decided he wanted to join us at this point, so I let each of them unwrap some butter and put it into the bowl. Xander wanted a paper towel to wipe his hands off with. Claire just licked hers. (Don't worry, I made her wash her hands again.)
  
• After adding a few more ingredients, Claire decided she couldn't be bothered with a tissue, so she wiped her runny nose on her hand and then on her pants. Once again, she trekked into the bathroom to wash her hands.
  
• A conversation between Claire and Xander: Claire: "Do you know what bees wax is, Xander?" Xander: "Yeah." (He had no clue.) Claire: "There's wax that grows in your ear, so it's called bees wax." (I'm not sure I followed that logic, but hey...whatever works for them.) Xander: "Oh." Claire: "See? I'll show you." (Proceeds to pick ear wax out of her ear and hold it out to him.) For the third time in a matter of minutes, she washes her hands again. I think we've covered just about every orifice on her face.
  
• Claire wanted to turn on the mix master, so I told her to turn it to a 1. She accidentally notched it up to about an 8. All the ingredients splashed, floated, and stuck everywhere. I looked down at my red shirt which was now white with flour, my socks splattered with egg-vanilla freckles, and the counter dripping gelatinous clumps onto the floor, and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I wondered how much of the ingredients made their way out of the bowl and if the cookies would still taste just as good with half an egg missing and no vanilla.
  
• The second-to-last step of the recipe called for a sprinkling of chocolate chips onto the batter in the pan. "There is no way kids can mess this up," I thought to myself. I gave them each a few handfuls of chocolate chips, and they sprinkled them quite well, I must say. As a reward, I let them each take a few to eat. Breathing a sigh of relief, I started lifting the pan away just as Claire started laughing. "What are you laughing about?" I asked, to which she replied, "Xander just dropped a chocolate chip out of his mouth into the pan." I thought of all the mothers who would be attending the cookie exchange, and then I thought of all the tiny little hands that helped make all the cookies, and of all the tiny little now-empty orifices that hovered above all the batters, and thought to myself, "What you don't know won't hurt you."