Cookie Mom

Image via Wikipedia

This is the time of year when an adorable little girl comes to your door to sell you delicious Girl Scout cookies — or the more likely scenario is that the adorable little girl’s parents hit you up at work because they already have 85 little girls in the neighborhood and they don’t want their daughter going door-to-door selling stuff and possibly meeting the creepy neighbors.   What you don’t know is that behind every troop full of cute little girls selling cookies and then delivering them is a Cookie Mom – which isn’t as silly as the name of the person who coordinates the sales of Boy Scout popcorn – the Popcorn Colonel!

I have been the Cookie Mom for my girls’ troop – but only once — I couldn’t afford to do it more than that.  I had already been a Daisy leader (pre-Brownie age girls — kindergarteners) and I didn’t have time to do that again for an entire year.  I wanted to help the troop so I chose Cookie Mom because I figured it was short-term and how hard could it be to gather the individual orders, place the order for the troop, divide up the cookies, give the orders to the girls and collect the money.  Since I was doing this for a Brownie troop, I didn’t have to worry about booth sales — thank goodness because I don’t think I could have afforded that!

It turns out that time wasn’t the problem with being Cookie Mom — it was the money involved.  No, I didn’t have to put out the money to get the cookies for the troop – but it turns out that at that time (don’t know if this is still true), cookies could only be ordered by the case.  There were 12 boxes of cookies per case – and if your troop only needed 3 cases and 1 box of cookies – you had to order 4 cases – which means the girls would have to sell extra cookies.  Luckily for my troop and unluckily for my bank account this was not a problem.

When the cookies were delivered to my house, I filled my garage with approximately 100 cases of Girl Scout cookies.  I want you to think as a child and imagine watching 100 cases of cookies entering your house — my boys thought that we had won the lottery and were being paid in cookies!  As far as they were concerned this was the same as manna from heaven — they knew that happy days were ahead.

I managed to barricade the cookies in the garage until I could at least send the ones out the door which had been ordered.  That left me with approximately 20 cases of cookies which were homeless – but not for long.  If I had only had some barbed wire, I could probably have kept the wild beasts away from the food supply – at least for a small amount of time.  But it was not meant to be — every day, I found that I was going to have to kick in more money for at least 3 boxes of cookies which had ‘mysteriously’ disappeared!

Since I had done such a good job at getting rid of the extra cookies, I was asked to be Cookie Mom the following year.  I had to decline because I just couldn’t afford to do such a good job again!