I am so incredibly grateful, excited and terrified all at the same time. It’s taken me literally YEARS to get to this point. I used to make cookies for friends and family every Christmas. I loved decorated cookies, and back when I started doing it, they were impossible to find and buy anywhere, so I thought, “I just need to learn to do this myself if I want to eat those delicious cookies!”

For so many years my friends and family have tried to encourage me to start selling them. But the cost in starting a business, along with the space and time needed to run a business was overwhelming. That along with the fact that over the last 15 years I’ve been raising two children, homeschooling them, various jobs such as photographer and teacher, moving constantly, being a good wife to my wonderful husband, took graduate classes for my degree… LIFE IS BUSY! I knew mentally that doing this as a business would take a lot out of me, and there wasn’t much left over from all of this.

Finally though, my kids are older, homeschooling is a well oiled machine and we have a forever home with space. Earlier this year I decided it was finally time. Time to put all my effort and work into something I love.

Now bare with me, I’m going to share pictures from over the last 15 years of cookies I’ve made. I DEFINATELY have improved. This journey through time is something I hesitated to share. I know we want to present a “perfect” image, but I want to share that we all have to start somewhere, and we have to fail many times to grow.

Just to reiterate, my skills are much better now, this is just a journey through time to see how far I’ve come.

“Perfection is a willingness to be imperfect”

— Lao Tsu

2008

The Christmas I finally decided to give cookie making a try. I had NO IDEA what I was doing. Bare in mind, I started without instagram, pinterest, youtube etc. I was learning entirely on my own and made my own best guesses. It’s a little painful for me to watch my own progression over the years.

2009

2010

I do distinctly remember feeling really excited and proud of how well I was doing. Looking now, I see how I needed to learn so much still. Here I started using sprinkles, I remember thinking they would make a good garland on the trees for lights. I was also really proud of my tree stumps.

2011

Here I started learning some new techniques, outlining, adding embellishments, and not having the icing cover every space. I also would like to point out, I only used one consistence of icing, I didn’t really know about making flood or stiff icing consistencies, and I was using an egg white recipe, which was DELICIOUS but very difficult to shape.

2012

Here is an example of something that happened a few too many times. I would get cookies baked, icing done and then be too exhausted to decorate. Right around now is when I had not one, but TWO young children. Our first we had just found had autism and the other was a newborn. I was hardly sleeping as most moms will understand. But as you can see, I tried to do some different consistencies, but exhausted myself no realizing I could use tip less bags, or freeze my icing etc.

2013

Then comes 2013, where I made HUGE improvements and baking cookies a lot more often.

Confession time, I attribute this improvement to finally taking some antidepressant medicine that helped me immensely during my pregnancy and after. I unfortunately stopped taking it due to my insurance not coving it and it being too expensive for us at the time. I thought I would be fine without it, but after 2013 I struggled and didn’t even bake for several years.

2014

2015

2016

Here is where I stopped taking my medication, and only made cookies when someone asked me. I didn’t even care to take too many pictures of them. I only made these bachelorette party cookies and then nothing until 2018 when I made some birthday cookies, and then nothing again until 2020. I feel like I might have made some cookies I didn’t decorate, just would have them around for Christmas and and icing bag in the fridge to use really quickly if we wanted to eat one.