BAKE COOKIES!

Have you ever taught children to bake cookies? I have! (The boys in the pictures are my grandsons.)

Children  love to  bake cookies and they love to help. They don’t question.  

Given the opportunity children dump everything together. They don’t care. Wet, dry, sugar, flour - it’s all the same to them.  

We have a holiday cookie recipe called “Texas Tea Cakes”, and it’s a great kid cookie.  

2 eggs, 1 cup butter, 1 cup of sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla; 1 teaspoon of baking power, 1 teaspoon of salt; 3  to 3 ½ cups flour, just mix it all together,  and  plunk  it down onto the counter.  Add enough flour by kneading  the dough until it feels like play dough, then bake the cookies at 325 degrees until they are firm to the touch.  

When our daughter, Karen was a kid she really did bake these cookies in her Easy Bake Oven.

Texas Tea Cakes have been cooked on open fires and in convection ovens. They work!

However, when I try to teach adults how to make these cookies, I am consistently bombarded with questions.

“Well do I cream the butter and eggs together before I add the sugar?  Or about how thick do I roll them? Finally, when do I know  they are done?”

Adults and children are very different. Neither is right or wrong; we’re just different. For adults something has happened to our willingness to experiment.  

Adults  are self directed while children are more free with accepting new ideas. Adults want a specific, measurable plan. We want to know how long to cream the sugar, when to add the flour, and what the finished cookie should look like.  

Adults challenge new information, children accept it! Adults will ask questions like, “How did  those cookies turn out for you?" before they even buy the ingredients to make the cookies. Children just have fun.

Adults look for immediate return. Children engage without worrying about the how they will use what they are learning. Think about when you memorized your multiplication tables.

As adults I believe we should think responsibly. When you don’t follow the directions your cookie may not turn out. However sometimes, I also think we should be like young children simply trust our learning environment.

Children experiment a lot and I believe we can learn from kids.   

To keep in line with today’s blog thinking, we should experiment, learn and bake cookies!

And oh by the way, let me know how your cookies turn out!

Who Moved My Cheese?

Do you remember the book,  “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson?  It’s that 1990’s business classic on change.

In the story  two mice (Scurry and Sniff) and two little people (Hem and Haw) are faced with change and what they will do or will not do with change! The bottom line really is, change and survive or die. Some of the characters in the book came to that understanding earlier than others.

Tom Butler Bowdon, in his Success Classics blog has this to say about the Johnson book:

The fable captures well that moment after we have lost a job or a relationship and we believe it is the end of the world. All the good things were in the previous situation, and all the future holds is fear. Yet Johnson's message is, instead of seeing change as the end of something, we must learn to see it as a beginning. We have all been told this, but sometimes motivation is lacking. To make himself accept reality, Haw writes this on the wall of the maze: "If you do not change, you can become extinct."

As Johnson teaches, there are three stages of change.  

1. Preparing for change
2. gaining the change skills you need 
3. achieving your change

Don’t get me wrong. Change is hard, really, really hard! However, change is inevitable, things simply never remain the same, in today’s world we are always changing.

Aunt Knoxine reminded me of that.  Aunt Knoxine is my Dad’s sister, I have loved her all my life. Secretly I always wanted to be her daughter. She and Mother would line all the cousins up in a straight line and ask perfect strangers who belonged to whom. Most of the time I ended up with Aunt Knoxine.  

Life was not easy for Aunt Knoxine. She was a single mom for many years, taught kindergarten, raised three children and remained faithful to life.  

This past weekend she and I were on the phone and she said, “Carolyn, I have changed more in the last twenty years than any other time I can remember in life!”

Aunt Knoxine is a wise woman. She is open to listen to varied opinions and try to understand different belief systems, she is non judgmental. She loves life and people. She has traveled all over the world - she tries new food, reads contemporary material, studies fresh ideas. She is very open. Aunt Knoxine is a changeling.

I want that! When I am 89 I hope I tell my niece Kristen the same thing.

Life is about risk and it’s about change. It is about letting go and adapting.  

Be willing to  look at what changes you need to make ‘cause your cheese is being moved every day.