A More Embarrassing Costume May Be Needed

You can teach an old dog new tricks, so the first time Mila wakes up each night, she goes back to bed with me. That means that while she starts each night in her crib, there's a fairly good chance I will get baby cuddles by morning. Sometimes the cuddling starts five minutes after she first goes down for the night. Sometimes that means I get summoned just minutes before my alarm goes off for the day.

Last night fell somewhere in the middle. 1:00 am I heard the familiar, "Moooom. Mom. Mom."

Back in Alexis' day, those sounds would have had me up battling a tiny person for hours. But I'm smarter now! I grabbed Mila and went straight back to bed instead of trying to convince her to sleep in her crib.

For all of her life, Mila has been cool with that. For all of her life, Mila has been very happy to go right back to sleep. Instantly. No battle.

That all ended in a most spectacular fashion last night.

I have no idea what the problem was, I just know that Mila wouldn't go back to sleep. And she was PISSED that she was awake. She yelled at me. She screamed "NO NO NO NO NO NO" over and over and over for an hour. She kicked me. She thrashed. She rolled around. She sat up. She laid down. She screamed. She carried on and on.

Mad Mila was in full effect.

She didn't want me to hold her, but heaven help us all if I put her down. The yelling! OMG THE YELLING!

And so much NO NO NO NO NO NO.

Two hours. It took two hours for her to finally fall back asleep. For two hours I tried to accommodate a furious little person, even as she barely acknowledged that I was trying to help her.

The interesting part of the whole fiasco is that it's Halloween week. Methinks maybe Mila should reconsider whether or not it's a good idea to mess with me when I hold the keys to her outfit this weekend.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

There's National Kale Day, Take Your Teddy Bear to Work Day, National Balogna Day, and a multitude of other completely pointless holidays, but do we have a national holiday celebrating the person who first figured out to put chocolate and peanut butter together?

We might. The list of holidays is too long for me to stay awake while reading the whole thing, but still. It should be a day. It should be a week. Actually, it should be a BIG! HUGE! WEEK-LONG CELEBRATION! WITH FIREWORKS!

I kinda like peanut butter and chocolate together, guys.

Obviously, thinking about peanut butter and chocolate together very quickly leads to things happening in the kitchen. Like cookies.

This is Mindy's recipe. That woman knows how to rock the cookie thing, so there's not sense in going past her site and looking for anything else. It's not even worth trying to tweak her recipes because perfection. She bakes perfection.

Exceeeeeept. A certain Big Kid may have inhaled a bunch of my chocolate and peanut butter chips before they could turn into cookies. Thus, I subbed in Peanut Butter M&Ms. Desperate times lead to genius.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

1/4 granulated sugar
1 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 cup creamy peanut butter
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups milk chocolate chocolate chips
1 cup Peanut Butter M&Ms

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

2. Line a couple of cookie sheet with parchment paper.

3. Toss the granulated sugar in a bowl. You're going to roll your little happy cookie balls in it before you bake them. Set it aside until you're ready to roll.

4. Medium mixing bowl. Butter, brown sugar, peanut butter, eggs, and vanilla. Make them do a little dance together.

5. In a separate medium mixing bowl, throw together your flour, baking soda, and salt. More dancing.

6. Now put the dance partners from each of your bowls in one bowl and mix them all together. Fold in the chocolate chips and Peanut Butter M&Ms.

7. Take a heaping teaspoon of dough and roll it into a ball. Now roll it in the granulated sugar. Place your happy little sugar-coated ball on your cookie sheet then repeat until your cookie sheet is full. You will want the cookie balls to be at least two inches apart because these cookies do spread.

8. Let's help guide that spreading, shall we? Use the palm of your hand to press each cookie flat. Each one should be about 1/3 inch thick.

9. Bake at 375 degrees for 8-9 minutes. Here's the only tricky thing -- that time will vary depending on how big you make the cookies. I used 1" happy little balls and 8 minutes was perfect. If you go bigger than 1", bake them longer. Start keeping an eye on them around the 7-minute mark just to be safe.

10. Count the number of times you smirked when I wrote "balls." If you scored more than five, welcome to my club. We're super grown-up and stuff here.

Monstsers