Molly, my six year old daughter, and I recently made cookies together. She wasn’t quite sure what to think of the whole process, especially the long wait for the finished product at the end. By the time we finished, she had dough in her little black curly locks, between her toes, on the top of her nose and in her eyelashes, but her tongue never stopped! Molly’s so similar to other people’s children that it’s hard for me to remember that she’s not viewed that way by the public most of the time. My daughter is a registered toy poodle and people generally can’t see past the fur.

My Girl isn’t tall enough to see the top of the counter, even when she stands on her tippy toes and stretches as far as she can stretch. Her little nose tells her the details of what’s going on up there, though. It twitches and sniffs as she moves her head from side to side to get the best whiff of whatever can be whuffed. Molly is only 9 inches tall at her shoulders but when she stands on tip-toe, she’s about two feet tall.

Before we even begin the cookies, I ask her if it’s a good idea. It’s a silly question to ask, really, but how she answers is worth being considered a little silly. I ask her, “Molly, shall we make cookies?” Her whole body stops all motion immediately and she whips her head around with a start. Wide brown eyes stare up at me for a few moments before she races toward me at a flat run and leaps at me. She bounces off my knees in an effort to get me started in the right direction so I don’t have a chance to put it off.

So off we go to the kitchen. The first ingredients aren’t terribly interesting to her, at least not separately. She might go ahead and eat the butter, but it’s not a favorite. While I’m cutting the butter into to the dry ingredients, she paces about my feet, twining in and out, back and forth. After I get out the eggs and peanut butter, she starts talking to me. My best guess is that she’s observed people speaking to one another and tries to copy that. Some of her noises actually sound like words but most just sound like she’s singing a song of R’s. Her grandma calls the noises budgy noises, though I don’t understand why. I think I’d call them ar-ar noises, myself.