Day 2 of the 30 Days of Gratitude Challenge: Your Favorite Food.

There are several answers to this question…pizza (Dewey’s Green Lantern), dill pickle soup (The Fountain on Locust), my mom’s breakfast casserole, etc. But in the context of this gratitude challenge, I need to give a shout out to cookies. Specifically, my cookies.

And not because I enjoy eating them any more than I enjoy other kinds of cookies (Mallomars, hello). Rather, it’s what my cookies represent: learning, growth, improvement, creativity, and love. My daughter-in-law and I took our first decorating class three years ago this month. Everything was supplied for us, including the cookies, tools and icing. We just needed to learn the techniques. And we LOVED it. Since then, we’ve learned how to bake our own cookies, create our own icing, purchased our own supplies and come up with our own designs.

The batch shown here is our latest project — a gift for a very special one-year old’s birthday party. And we are so proud. It’s so fun to be able to look back over our bakes and see improvement. And it’s even more fun to take what we’ve done, give it away and make someone else happy.

So, for Day 2, I’m grateful for my favorite cookies. I’m grateful to have a hobby to share with my daughter-in-law — and a product that brings others joy.