Dad copes with cookie cult

Every year at this time, I'm immersed in the cookie cult.

It's habit forming.

My wife, Joni, is one of the leaders of a fourth-grade Girl Scout troop. As such, she is heavily involved in the dealing of Thin Mints and all those other tasty varieties of Girl Scout cookies.

She, along with other leaders of the troop and troop members, spent all day Saturday at the local mall hawking the tasty treats and distributing boxes of cookies for troop members to fill delivery orders.

It's not easy keeping track of hundreds and hundreds of boxes of cookies and making sure that each Scout member gets what they ordered -- whether its Thin Mints, Peanut Butter Sandwich cookies or one of the other cookie concoctions.

Naturally, I volunteered to help with the cookie distribution. OK, it was more like I was drafted.

It's hard to say no when your wife is a troop leader.

So I spent much of the day in the mall parking lot, distributing cookies to our Scout troop from the back of our van. A fellow leader of our Scout troop also distributed boxes of cookies from her van.

At times during the cool, cloudy day, we wondered if we could be busted for dealing cookies from our vans.

Fortunately, police left us to tailgate as we saw fit.

It appears there's no law in our town restricting Girl Scout cookie sales.

That's not surprising. The Girl Scout cookies operation has become a major endeavor nationwide.

The NCAA has its March Madness of basketball. But the Girl Scouts have their own version of March Madness when it comes to delivering all those Girl Scout cookies to friends, family and neighbors.

Thankfully, our family has two vans: One that was filled almost to overflowing with cartons of boxed cookies and the other which we could use to haul around our daughters.

At this rate, we'll soon have to invest in a full-fledged delivery truck.

After emptying our cookie van on Saturday, we still were left with Bailey's boxes of cookies to sort and bag so our fourth grader could deliver them to her customers.

While the nation tuned in the Academy Awards on television Sunday night, Joni, Bailey and I worked our way through the cartons of boxed cookies stacked in our living room, bagging them for final delivery.

Our pet pooch, Cassie, clearly wanted to help. Or maybe she was just hoping for a cookie as she meandered around the cookie boxes.

Eventually, she moved on. I wasn't quite sure if she just grew tired of watching our cookie efforts or the Academy Awards.

Of course, distributing Girl Scout cookies is hard work. You have to take a break every now and then.

Naturally, I took several breaks so I could chow down on chocolate mint and lemon cookies. Like other Scout parents, we bought our share of Girl Scout cookies.

I thought about opening some more boxes of Girl Scout cookies, but decided against it. After all, I have to have some self control.

But it's reassuring to know that I can eat my way through a box of cookies and still feel good about it.

Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.