Cookies
The Toasted Cheese Writing Prompt for today is "Write about Cookies"

I'm going in free form, I'm not getting anything
Cookies.
Baked, bought, eaten, tossed. Chocolate chip. Raw cookie dough. With cinnamon. Baking cookies with mom as a kid. Thinking of teaching my own kids to bake cookies.
OK. Now I've got one.

I remember as a kid really loving to cook and bake. I was a 'latch-key' kid, though we didn't call it that back then, and I often used that time to cook or start cooking supper for the family meal. A lazy Sunday afternoon could turn into a great cookie baking experience, sometimes followed by old movies on the tube.
My mom had the Betty Crocker Cookie Book, that she had received from her parents (mother mostly, I'm presuming) as either a wedding gift or a first anniversary gift. I always loved the note that gram wrote in it: "To a couple of good cookies, from a couple of crumbs." And I remember thinking as a kid that I hoped I would receive a similar gift, right down to the note, when I was a young adult.
As I would be preparing the cookie dough, my mind would race, as it usually did, and I would soon be creating my own cookbook, cooking with kids. Since I loved to taste the dough along the way, and found it very scientific, I added that into the recipes I formed in my head. "Taste the plain butter, taste the plain sugar, mix them together, and taste the result. How has the taste changed?" This was how my cookbook would be different, relating specifically to how the kids wanted to experiment as they were baking. "Raise the oven by 50 degrees, and bake the next pan 5 minutes less. How are the baked cookies different? Better?"
I imagined baking with my own kids, actually I imagined doing a lot of things with my own kids. I didn't ever have a fully-formed idea of who they were or what they would be like, but I imagined how I would talk to them, things I would do with them, how I would discipline them.
I guess I always practiced being a parent. That is one of my only clear 'what I want to be when I grow up' kind of fantasies.
Now, actually being a parent, I do most of the time live up to the ideals of my younger self. Being honest with them, talking things through, not spanking, letting them experiment with things even when it gets messy, teaching them the things I learned. And the things I am still learning.