My Dear "Kindred Spirit,"

Now, at least in our house, Freihofers chocolate chip cookies aren’t really considered the ultimate dessert. But when there’s nothing else sweet in the house, they’ll do just fine. And even if there is other stuff, they still get eaten.

We know someone who used to get outdated baked goods from the nearest Freihofers – they’d call him when they had enough recently outdated stuff that he could pick up. He’d make his rounds to the different churches in the area, and when there was a lot, he would normally drop by our house with a bunch of goodies.

I remember one time in particular several years ago, when for two or three weeks straight we got chocolate chip cookies – lots of them. I mean, like between two and three dozen boxes of chocolate chip cookies every week.

Of course, we gave a lot of them away, but even so, we were still rather over-run with cookies.

This was around the time David was just learning to talk. He would hold himself up by the bars in his playpen, and ask for something to eat – a cracker, normally. And of course, he’d ask non-stop for his cracker.

Well…

You can see this one coming, can’t you?

Before you go getting the wrong idea, let me explain to you that mom had nothing to do with all this. In fact, if she had known we were feeding him cookies – and the quantity of cookies we were feeding him – I’m sure she would have put a stop to it. But with nine children, mom doesn’t seem to notice much.

As for us – we were having a ball. We were all pretty tired of those cookies, but mom wouldn’t make anything else while they were still there. And it was kind of fun to feed them to David – see how many he would eat. He liked them.

Oh, he liked them a little too well for his own good, at first.

We didn’t keep track of how many we fed him (I wish we had) – but I honestly think it averaged out to about a box a day.

Talk about living high on the hog! That kid had it made.

It didn’t last very long, though. Within a few days he made it very plain that he would rather have a cracker than those cookies that used to be such a rare treat to him. And by the end of two weeks, he wouldn’t even look at a chocolate chip cookie. We all thought it was kind of funny, the way he refused to touch them. And that lasted – It was close to a year before he would eat another chocolate chip cookie.

I guess he’d had his fill of them in those two weeks.