Adventures in Cookie Baking

Our church small group was meeting here at our home tonight and it is the birthday of one of the kids (Happy 9th, R!!). Bean decided she wanted to bake some cookies for the occasion and she invited one of her best friends, Tiger, over to help. Bean and I have baked cookies together many, MANY times, so I figured an almost-12-year-old and a just-turned-13-year-old would have no problems with baking a batch of cookies from a recipe.
HA!
As I was upstairs, they were downstairs working in the kitchen and I heard much giggling (they are girls, after all!). I finally ventured downstairs to see how it was going. Oh, how I wish I'd had the camera with me. Bean and Tiger were both liberally coated in flour. There was a *mound* of cookie dough on the island, surrounded by what was possibly enough flour to make another batch of cookies. Now, keep in mind that these were Oatmeal/Chocolate Chip/Walnut cookies, your basic "drop by rounded spoonfuls"/KEEP THE DOUGH IN THE BOWL cookie recipe. Yet, somehow, Bean and Tiger had managed to use almost every one of my Pampered Chef kitchen tools (the cookie scoop I could understand, but I'm still not clear on how the Mini Tart Shaper got involved! There was also some rolling pin involvement--I'm grateful she doesn't know where I keep the cookie cutters. LOL). The story I ended up getting was that once they had stirred in the oats and chocolate chips, there simply wasn't any more room in the bowl for them to mix in the walnuts (BTW, they used my bag of walnut halves, not the bag of walnut pieces I had purchased with this project in mind), so they thought mixing it on the island would be easier (not neater, just easier). About the Mini Tart Shaper, I was told they were trying to use it to break down the butter ("Did you put the butter in the microwave for 10 seconds to soften it?" I inquired. Blank looks ensued.). No satisfactory answer has been forthcoming about the involvement of the rolling pin, though.
It looks like this summer might be a good time for a refresher course in Cookie Basics 101!
The cookies turned out a little lumpy looking (the walnut halves), but they *are* delicious. Bean & Tiger have dubbed them "Choc-O-Dough Cookies" and plan to put them in a cookbook they have decided to write together. I can't wait to see what else they create.
TTFN~