Saturday, February 13, 2010

Buried Alive



So, we've just emerged from a week of snow. Correction, a week of snow that culminated in drifts of nearly four feet. Stuck in the house for days, I was forced to do the only thing i knew how to do to survive...eat cookies. Lots and lots of cookies. There were Hershey Kiss peanut butter cookies, butterscotch chip oatmeal , black and white, frosted cut-out ...I could go on.

I spent three solid days ingesting only food that was made of butter and sugar and required a baking temperature of 375 degrees.

"Honey. Aren't you going to get sick eating all those cookies?" my worried husband (who, by the way ingested his fair share of sweets over the snow week -- hypocrite) would say.

"Mine yo own bifnuss. Are you gonnaf eaf fat coofee?" I'd say, mouth full and paw out ready to snatch his.

When I wasn't baking cookies, I was either a.) eating them directly from the cookie plate or b.) roaming around the house snatching up discarded unwanted cookies and jamming them directly into my face in a flurry of crumbs. Nope, no pie hole over here. Cookie hole.

"Hey! Where did my cookie go?" M would whine.

"Oh not sho honey. Maybe ova day?" I'd mutter and point aimlessly over her head, hoping to distract her from the crime scene. Not only was I guilty, but due to the fact that I was unable to enunciate words with an entire chocolate chip cookie jammed in my mouth, not that slick either.

I hit an all-time low when I went to use the bathroom, peed, stood up to pull my pants up and caught a glimps of myself in the mirror. My chin was covered in cookie crumbs and there was a shmear of chocolate on the right corner of my mouth.
Yes, I stood there for a moment, sweat pants around my ankles and cookie all over my face and felt something more powerful than ingesting 22 cookies in one sitting. Shame.

"Oh God..."

Oh God is right. The snow needed to stop. It needed to stop or others would continue to suffer. I had taken to shuffling around in long johns all day -- changing in the evening into, yes, another pair of long johns. ("Mommy, you're the only one who hasn't changed her clothes aaaaaaall day.") I'd bark random orders about softening butter and sifting flour. I'd panic if the cookies weren't removed from the oven the second the timer went off. (Nothing like a batch of overbaked hockey puck cookies to ruin a true cookie binge.) Before one batch of cookies had even been eaten, with my mouth watering and eyes bulging, I'd yell (to no one in particular), "Who wants to make more cookies! I'm going to make more cookies! Yum. More cookies!"

I'd lost it.

But before the white coat dudes could cart me off, before vegetables became a mythical memory,before my husband had to pry an M&M cookie from my cold, lifeless hand...it stopped. Snowing, that is.

And, sad as it was, I had to leave my cookies behind.

Oh, and just so there is photographic evidence of the reason for my slothlike behavior (because, you know, I'd never behave like that otherwise)...snow pics...