I've Reached A Parenting Milestone!!

Picture of the cookies I just baked.  (Photo credit: Me)

Yesterday I let my kids eat cookie dough. 

Yes, you read that right. I have finally gotten to the point where I determined that their 12 & 9 year old bodies can handle raw dough. Yes, I feel ridiculous at how long it has taken me to get to this point.

Now, in no way shape or form do I condone the use of cookie dough either for medicinal or recreational use. Consuming cookie dough is a slippery slope into much harder doughs like cake, muffin and brownie batter which I absolutely do not condone. (But freaking YUM, amIright??)


Here's how it all went down. I found what I now call the "Magical Cookie Dough". It is not magical because it doesn't contain eggs (it does), it's magical because you make the batter, form it into balls, stick it in the fridge, then bake them cold after smooshing them a bit. This hits ALL my "perfect Mommy" buttons because:

1. I am making them from scratch so I can control the ingredients, use organic when I have it and if I want to and keep out all the stuff that I'm constantly trying (and often failing) to control. 

2. I get to have that "perfect Mommy" moment when the kids get home and I get to say, "who wants fresh cookies still warm from the oven?" Of course I'm singing it and my voice is perfect because hey, thats how I roll.  

So in my mind we're sitting around this perfectly clean and tidy kitchen and enjoying our afternoon snack, and it totally would have been clean and tidy if I had not just mixed cookies hours before and then life got in the way but whatever... we're sitting around the table and I take my first bite of the Magical Cookie which has allowed me to live out this perfect Mommy fantasy and I say, "ugh! The dough was better!"

And it was, it has cream cheese, butter (organic of course), more brown sugar than white sugar, extra vanilla and of course the aforementioned eggs, the dough was delicious. Then I hear...

(*gasp*) "You ate the dough?? I want the dough!" Thank you, Adam for catching that and everything else I say that I shouldn't. Eating dough in our house was strictly verboten and in the past I had to sneak my love for cookie dough into the pantry, the laundry room or even the garage.

It was then that I realized that my boys are NINE and TWELVE! By the time I was 12 I would make brownie batter with absolutely no intention of baking it at all, I was mixing and measuring only so that I could eat the batter. Of course after a few spoonfuls my stomach would start hurting and I would bake off the rest because it really is a sin to let good dough go to waste. So it was completely ridiculous that I was keeping the boys from the great wonderfulness that is cookie dough.

I had only baked one cookie sheet of the dough balls from the fridge so there were still a lot left over, I got out three cookie balls and gave each of us one. I did the prudent parent thing of telling them that the ingredients in the dough were raw and it is not a good idea to eat some raw foods but just this once they could try the dough.

We all agreed that the dough is indeed better than the cookies and that I would continue to bake a few more sheets because you can't take raw cookie dough to school in your lunchbox. With the added bonus that I got to have another perfect Mommy moment when I included two homemade chocolate chip cookies in each box this morning.

So thats the parenting milestone I've reached this week. I feel it is pretty monumental. Maybe not as monumental as when I let The Hubs take the boys (BY HIMSELF) to visit my in-laws on their uncleared retirement property in New York that has no running water, no sewer and no electricity. I was pretty much convinced that the boys would come home broken in some way shape or form, but they didn't.

I patted myself on the back for not freaking the hell out that weekend and today because sometimes being the Perfect Mommy isn't about controlling everything that goes into their mouth, sometimes it's about letting them eat the dough and then hiding the rest in the back of the fridge in an empty container that used to contain non-fat, sugar free, unflavored yogurt because there's no way I am sharing my stash!


PS: The Magical Cookie Dough recipe is actually Softbatch Cream Cheese Chocolate Chip Cookies from blog Averie Cooks, which I found through Pinterest. Recipe HERE.