How to Get a Solid Nine Hours of Sleep

I slept a solid nine hours the past two nights. Before my world fell apart halfway through this year, nine hours was standard for me. Since then, I haven't slept nine hours straight. Until now.

The culprit (or, the answer to my sleep problems)? It seems the answer is something I never would have imagined: cookies.

A couple of months ago, my two younger sisters decided to get into the home baking business. Nothing big, really. They just got into baking one day and decided, hey, our stuff is yummy, maybe we should sell. And so they did. To their friends, to relatives, to the neighbors, to my boyfriend's officemates. The orders kept coming, and everyone was happy.

Until, as predicted by my Mom, my sisters began to lose interest in baking. J, whose interest in the baking part was marginal to begin with and who focused more on advertising (i.e., bringing goodies to school for her friends to taste), retail/marketing (i.e., getting orders), and accounting (i.e., reimbursing my mom for ingredients, gasoline, and electricity, and splitting up the profits between her and my other sister), showed up in the kitchen less and less. Q, who is the chief baker and is largely responsible for starting this whole baking thing, has lost all interest in the actual baking, decorating, and packing; all she likes to do now is make the dough/batter.

And so, to whom does all the work fall? No other than the mom and the older sister (i.e., me), and, by default, the older sister's boyfriend, of course.

And all this just in time for an order for a whopping 800 cookies, our biggest single order to date.

So, sometime in the afternoon on the day before the orders were due, we got to work. J was sick, so she was stuck in bed. Q wanted to bring mini cupcakes to her Christmas party the next day, so she got started on those. Mom laid out the baking sheets, preheated the oven, and brought out the cookie dough from the fridge (it was made the day before). I measured and balled the dough and placed the balls on a cookie sheet, and Mom placed them into the oven and was in charge of removing them from the oven when they were done. While they were baking, I continued to measure, ball, and place dough on the cookie sheets. Mom helped Q with the cupcakes.

Once the cookies were done, Mom removed them from the oven, and I eased them off the cookie sheet with a spatula (?) and placed them on a cooking rack, one by one. I then started to place more cookie dough on the sheet I just emptied. Meanwhile, Mom placed a new batch into the oven and continued to help Q with her cupcakes.

Before long, we were rolling like a machine. Mom removed a batch from the oven and placed in a new one before helping Q with her cupcakes. I took cooled cookies from the cooling rack and arranged them on a tray, got the fresh batch of cookies off the cookie sheet and onto the cooling rack, and spooned more cookie dough onto the cookie sheet, all the while keeping track of how many cookies we had already made.

Seven hours later, the machine was still rolling, although the cupcakes were done, Q was gone, and in between her oven duties, Mom went around fixing stuff in the house instead of frosting cupcakes. Seven hours later, the machine has not sat down once. Seven hours later, a new cog arrived in the form of R, my boyfriend.

We still needed to make four sheets' worth of cookies. Mom took over cookie duties, from spooning the dough onto the cookie sheet all the way to transferring freshly made cookies to the cooling rack. R and I began to pack the cookies into 40 containers, 20 cookies per. It was not a simply matter of putting 20 cookies into one container and moving on to the next. There tends to be some variation between batches, and we didn't want one container to have slightly darker or chewier cookies than another, so we arranged the containers into an assembly line and dropped a single cookie into each of them, one by one, to make sure each batch was represented in each container. The baking of the four remaining sheets of cookies and the packing took another hour and a half, after which all three of us, Mom and I, especially, were ready to collapse.

Eight hours of nonstop work without stopping to sit or eat (we did manage to drink water and use the bathroom when we needed to). Eight hours, the equivalent of a full day at work, and we made between 2/3 and 3/4 the minimum wage in your average Southeast Asian country.

Eight hours of baking cookies, it turns out, was all I needed to get my sleeping groove back.