Halloween baking fun:)

My boys LOVE to be in the kitchen with me.  The kitchen in the Azores was ideal for having their help.  They could stand on chairs on one side of the counter while I was on the other side passing whatever we were working on back and forth easily between them.  This house...  not as easy, but we are making it work.  I can bring a chair into the kitchen and have one boy at a time help me.  They have become pretty good at taking turns with the mixing and measuring and dumping in.

Mike's squadron had a Halloween party/picnic, which also included a dessert auction.  The boys and I volunteered to take our favorite lemon sugar cookies, which of course, include rolling and cutting out.  Mostly the boys will "help me" roll out the dough, cut out a few cookies, and then ask for their own dough, which they then pour a whole scoop of flour on and attempt to roll and cut out multiple times over, never actually achieving the perfect cookie.  Usually, they achieve small, floury lumps of cookie dough that break apart and they are unable to make it into a cookie, but they have a ton of fun.  As you can see from Max's face, cutout cookies are very serious business.
 

Jackson's hands look like this almost every time.  He likes to paint the table in flour and draw shapes in it while getting himself covered in flour.

After the cookies were cool, we made some lemon royal icing and we kept it white for the ghosts, I made it orange for pumpkins and grey for the bats.  The boys used some cheese knives to help me frost the cookies.  Again, very serious business. 

We had a minor catastrophe, wherein, Mommy accidentally bumped a tray of cookies, which slipped off the counter and right into the sink, into a bowl of water.  This was every single pumpkin we had made:(  A very sad moment for me and the boys didn't have anything good to say about it either.  The cookies did not, of course, fall into a dry sink, but into a bowl of water, making the frosting immediately smear and the cookies started to "melt."  

Our finished ghosts.  Yummy and cute!