Photo by Brandi Jordan

I am in awe of those moms who make life with children look so easy, so carefree, so Donna Reed-ish.  Because if there’s one thing I can tell you, it’s that that is so not my reality.  We argue, we fight, we yell use our outside voices inside, and more often than not, someone ends up in time-out whenever we start a project.  But today we did pretty good.  We made pretzels and no one got sent to time-out.  I consider that a win.

Since we’re on our “must eat non-processed food only” kick, we have been seriously lacking in snack food.  So much so, that Ultra-G was snacking on ice cubes.  Seriously.  It’s bad.

Well, we were all craving pretzels today, so I popped some ingredients in the bread machine and turned out a batch of dough.  The pretzel dough recipe is super-easy.  We sliced it into 12 pieces and each crafted our own pretzels.  Notice the heart one I made for Super Dad…aww.

I let the kids get messy and they painted on their own egg washes and sprinkled coarse salt on their creations.  15 minutes later we were munching on pretzels that contained ingredients we could name.

I’m not sure what was more rewarding…the pretzels tasting so good or the lesson in delayed gratification.  Either way, I was in desperate need of both.