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Sugar cookies are going to be the death of me.

My daughters, 7-year-old Zoe and 4-year-old Harmony, love them. They love eating them, and they love making them. They love fighting over who can use the star cookie cutter first and who will get to eat the angels -- the biggest finished product.

Whenever there is a lull in activity around the house, they ask if they can make some sugar cookies.

"What about chocolate chip cookies?" I suggest hopefully. "Or we could make some oatmeal-raisin cookies. They are Daddy's favorite and good for Zoe's cholesterol."

"No, we want to make sugar cookies!" they shout, their gangling limbs tumbling over each other on the milk-stained couch.

It's a lost cause.

It's not just that I am a dedicated chocolate-chip cookie fan and believe that any other baked good is a sad waste of sugar. It's the excessive amount of work that cutout cookies generate. It's hard to be a cheerful mother when you are outside in the dark hosing blazing orange icing off spoons and bowls while the kids are inside eating the stray sprinkles that fell on the floor.

And the fact that Zoe is a Type 1 diabetic complicates matters. We've ended a few baking sessions with blood sugars easing into the upper 300s. I have learned to estimate the amount of carbohydrates that she is slyly ingesting and administer insulin accordingly, but it is a tricky process.

To commence our culinary experience, we have to unearth all the cookie cutters that are under my children's beds and in the Play-Doh drawer. They have to be washed, along with the rolling pin that hides with Zoe's Barbie dolls. If the cookie dough has to be made from scratch, that entails even more time and patience as I delegate who gets to pour and who gets to stir.

Then Zoe, with typical oldest-child bossiness, takes over the rolling-pin duties, judiciously spilling flour into the cracks of my dining room table and onto the applesauce-soiled floor. I try to make a mental note of where the cookies from the first rolling session land as they will be the most palatable. By the fifth or sixth time the dough has been formed into a ball and flattened, the cookies begin to take on an unsavory pallor and cardboard flavor.

I attempt to teach Harmony the art of stamping the cookie cutter into the dough, wiggling and removing, but she hasn't grasped it quite yet. Zoe has mastered this skill and can even deftly remove the five-pointed star mostly intact, but she doesn't understand the importance of placing more than four cookies on one cookie sheet.

Sigh.

By the time the cookies are baked, I am fried.

But the work, I mean fun, has just begun. No matter how many times I tell Harmony that one drop of blue food coloring is sufficient, she insists on adding so many drops that the frosting will never resemble the purple she so desired. It is always a spooky gray hue, about the shade of their car seats.

Zoe can handle the responsibility of properly squeezing the food coloring tubes, but she licks her fingers. A lot.

Eventually they frost all the cookies and gleefully sample a select two.

Later, when they crawl into bed and relive the day's events, they will cite this undertaking as the best part of their day.

And I will, too, once they are asleep and I am settled on the couch sipping cold milk and munching store-bought chocolate chip cookies.

Contact Janice Carmac at 373-7098 or janice.carmac@news-record.com