My mother and I celebrated the first day of spring together this year, and for an outing I took her to an ambulatory surgery center where she gets cortisone shots to relieve the chronic pain in her back.

In preparation for our outing, I had gotten my son to the bus stop on time (just barely), taken the dog to doggy day camp, and done as much housework as I could fit in before leaving.

Having gotten uncharacteristically carried away with the housework, I found that the hour of my leaving had crept up on me, and instead of making reasoned and judicious decisions about what crochet to take along on the afternoon’s outing, I threw my hooks and my purse into a laundry basket of assorted projects, grabbed the basket, and headed out the door.

With minutes to spare, I got my mom to her appointment, sat down with my laundry basket of unfinished projects and what remained of a cappuccino, and got out the cookie bag I started work on yesterday.

A few missteps and a half dozen rounds later, this is how the bag-to-be looked:

and here it is with some of the cookies that it will be housing:

By the time I finished my cappuccino, I was ready to shift gears.

I set aside the bag got busy making more of the cookies needed to solve the cookie-dough-ku puzzle.

I had enough yarn with me to make almost all of the 38 cookies that remain to be crocheted, but it turned out that I only had time to make four of them before my mom was ready to go:

When my mom emerged, her face was visibly more relaxed than when she had gone in, and we celebrated what remained of our afternoon together with decadently large diet sodas, ready to face whatever is in front of us.