Once a year I buy Thin Mints from local Girl Scouts. 

They are one of my personal favorite cookies. I like that they are crispy, sweet, minty and I can fit a whole cookie easily into my mouth.

My step-kids love them. My kids love them too. 

My husband does not love them because he doesn’t like the flavor of mint. Which means they last longer in our house …that’s a win in my view.

My step-daughter was not a girl scout. My daughter was very briefly a brownie but never stepped up into girl scouts and never sold the cookies herself.

Where I live – kids don’t sell much door to door. Instead we pick up cookies from scouts outside the grocery store each year. Since I do the shopping this is usually something that I do as the mom.

I have heard that you can now buy the cookies online and that you can even have them delivered by postmates or doordash. Now that’s innovation!!

People will perhaps tell you before you have kids (or stepkids) that each child will be unique and different. 

I think this is true. It can be fun to see how they show up as their unique selves. It can also sometimes be quite challenging to allow our kids to step into their true selves

All of my kids 2 stepkids and 2 biokids have been content with me buying the cookies. When they were on sale the kids would say – please buy thin mints. 

Except one year when my youngest son took things into his own two small hands and came home with thin mints in his backpack. 

I was a little bit confused about how this would have happened since he was only I think 8 years old and didn’t have a dollar of his own to his name. 

There were times when I would send him with cash for a bake sale or something but I hadn’t done that on this day. 

He was too young for me to really worry that he had done anything against the rules. I wondered if maybe my husband gave him money that I didn’t realize or he had some money stashed away left over from something. 

I asked him how he got them and he told me he ordered them from his friend. 

Which made a little bit of sense except for the reality that he didn’t have any money. I didn’t know if she gave them to him and maybe she had a little crush or something going on or what. 

Then I got a note from his friend’s mom – who was also my mom friend –that my son had “ordered thin mints from her daughter.” and if I could please pay up.

Now everything made sense. 

I had a good laugh about it at the time. 

I may have had a quick thought that this was very clever what my son had done. 

Or maybe I didn’t think about that until later because it turns out that this was just one of the first times my son would be creative about figuring out how to get things done that he wanted. This child of mine is extremely motivated when there is something he wants. He’s a lot less motivated if it is something I want that he doesn’t care much about. 

There’s not a huge lesson in this story but if there is one it’s that kids are different and it’s fun to honor them for the ways they are different from each other,

He found a way to get himself thin mint cookies with the resources that he had. 

Me. 

I was his resource. Luckily thin mints were only $4 a box so it wasn’t a ton of money that he had put me on the line for. And as this kid has grown up we’ve had a few discussions about where the limits to what mom will buy might be. Ha!

As this kid is growing up he has repeated this creativity in a lot of ways. All of my kids are independent but this is my kid who has us sometimes saying  … how did you do that?  

My kids are older now and we each buy some thin mints every year. They are up to $5 a box this year still the best bargain of the year. 

That’s my thin mint story. I hope you enjoyed it.

Do you buy girl scout cookies? 

What are your favorite girl scout cookies?

Most important … do you store your thin mints in the fridge to enjoy them chilled?