The Four Stages of Good Grief: Gingerbread Edition

Before this holiday season I had never baked cookies before, ever. Not once. It's not that I have anything against baking cookies, it just never rose to the level of something I wanted to do enough to actually do it.

But kids are magical like that.

Both Judah and Noah heard a lot about the gingerbread man at their respective schools and kept asking if we could make some. So we did.

And I found out there are 4 stages of gingerbread cookie making.

Stage 1: Rolling out the dough and cutting the cookies. It's just like play-doh!

Stage 2: Decorating the cookies. Ridiculously messy. And sprinkles are from hell.

Stage 3: Eating the cookies. Mmmm high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils. Cancer tastes delicious.

Stage 4: Recreating the experience with play-doh! Noah actually ripped up pieces of paper-gingerbread men to put on his play-doh. Adorable example of art imitating life. Except they were Judah's paper-gingerbread men. Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth.

And there you have it! A tradition is born.