I'm fully aware that my child isn't as cute to others as she is to me, actually.
I had recorded an intro to this story months ago, but reconsidered it. I needed to replace it with something, and came up with the cookie recipe. First off, it's an excellent recipe. Second, I have too often heard stay at home moms described contemptously as "staying home baking cookies."
Disclaimer before I launch into the next paragraph: I am fully aware that people who choose not to have children face various difficulties and discrimination. I am not claiming that mothers have life more difficult than non-parents, it's just that I think this story addresses a particular difficulty mothers in this culture face.
I don't see this as a story of a woman going crazy because of hormones. I'd dislike it pretty intensely if I did.
In our culture, motherhood is severely idealized. You're supposed to put your child ahead of everything else, give up everything for them, and so on, everyone here knows that song. All of this is for the benefit of your children. The thing is, if you do that, really and truly give everything in your life over to raising your kids, you not only do psychological damage to yourself, but it's bad for the kids too.
Some moms just deal with not being perfect and blow off the criticism (and believe me, everyone has opinions on how you should raise your kids, and lots of people aren't the least bit shy in instructing you in what you're doing wrong), but some do what the mother in this story does. And for a while it works, but then when the inevitable day comes, and the kids grow up and want independent lives of their own, they have no psychological resources to deal with that.
I'd talked about that in the intro, but on reflection decided not to say any of that.
Okay. So. My daughter had asked if she could read a story--which is totally out of the question. She's a decent reader, but not good enough. But this story was from the POV of a child, which seemed appropriate, and its her cookie recipe as much as mine, she's made them many times. They're delicious cookies, and were a tremendous hit at her Girl Scout bake sale (all proceeds to a charity the girls decided on). I had nothing to do with the bake sale at all--she did all the work.
I made two files, one of me doing the intro, and one of her, and then left the choice up to Rachel and the audio editor as to which they wanted to use. So there you go.