Smacked Down By A Four-Year-Old

Yesterday morning, before the rest of my family got up, I put out plates of special Valentine's Day cookies for Baroy (who's been miserably--and legitimately--sick with the flu for almost a week), Em and N. Each cookie was made out of two homemade chocolate-cookie hearts sandwiched together with pink-tinted homemade icing; the top heart had a second, smaller heart cut out of it, so you could see the little pink heart. They took a ridiculous amount of work into the wee hours of the morning, but they came out adorable.

(Lest you think I've lost my mind, I made them for a bake sale N's preschool was doing. It was still an insane thing to do--I could have just slapped together some chocolate chips, or even bought something for the sale--but I like to think that explanation makes it somewhat less insane. Leave me with my delusion, please.)

Anyway, I let Em and N have them as a 'special' Vday breakfast. Except N, ever the sugar-baby, proceeded to eat them like Oreos, working away to get as much of the icing out as possible, and leaving chocolate-cookie pieces all over the place.

"N," I said, slightly annoyed, "don't just eat the frosting. Eat the whole thing! The cookies are good!"

He looked at me, this tiny guy, and paused, crumbled cookie in midair, finger cocked for another assault on the icing. "They're my cookies," he said calmly and quietly. "They're my special treat. I can do what I want with them."

"You know what?" I replied after a second, during which I had to remind myself that I'm almost ten time his age, and it's not the other way around. "You are absolutely right. Carry on."

And he did. And then I ate the cookies he left behind. Win-win, really.