My First Post Of The New School Year

My oldest is in high school this year - WHAT! - and for the first time in her life is at a school with a cafeteria. Once or twice a week, she's allowed to buy herself lunch and it's a whole new exciting world of french fries and pop sandwiched between lentil salads and plums packed from home.

AND! My middle kid has been very, very helpful with packing lunches this year, to the point where my primary lunch contribution has been making the occasional aforementioned lentil salad AND baking a lot. Like EVERYTHING ELSE so far in parenting, packing lunches was a seemingly-endless chore that has pretty much ended all at once without a lot of fanfare and so I am, mystifyingly enough, wistful for it. EVERYTHING ENDS, guys. OUR KIDS GET OLDER. And I guess this is parenthood, full of the same damn epiphanies all the time that we never learn from.

Yesterday, we took the youngest kid to get her missing booster shots, missing because she had a terrifying reaction to needles four years ago and she's spent the next four years having heart tests and blood tests and anything else they could think of to figure out why and finally it was decided that it would be safer to have her vaccinated and I spent the past several weeks feeling time rush bleakly up to her appointment. And then she DID start reacting and was promptly packed up in ice and I felt this rocky slide into dark water, felt absolute terror. AND THEN SHE WAS FINE but I was still a bit of a wreck.

So having my kids always getting older is the happy ending here, even if I would rewind time if I could, do it all over again but KNOW this time that it was finite. And my youngest kid is home today - achy and sore-armed but FINE and we are going to make cookies. These cookies, in fact:

Preheat your oven to 375.
In a heatproof bowl, soak one cup of raisins in boiling water. Set them aside for now.

Cream together:
3/4 cup butter
3/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup packed brown sugar.
Add:
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla

In a different bowl, sift together:
1 1/4 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt

Blend together the flour mixture and creamed butter/sugar. Stir in the DRAINED raisins and 1 cup of chocolate chips (or butterscotch chips or whatever you like. We've also done craisin/white chocolate variants and that was pretty well-received too.).
Bake for 8 to 10 minutes.

These are VERY VERY good. They keep well AND are sturdy enough to pack in lunches and are a fine thing to make on a fall afternoon with a still-little kid, home for just this little while.