It was midway through Year Two of #FridayCookies when a friend messaged me and condescendingly sweetly told me that it was a little embarrassing how I kept trying to make #FridayCookies happen, and maybe I should just, you know, make the cookies and all that, but stop with the hashtag. If you had read it, you’d have heard Mean Girls in your head, too. I didn’t bother to respond. Truthfully, I felt a little embarrassed for her because she completely missed the point.

Given that #FridayCookies is presumably my version of “fetch,” you probably need a little background explanation. In the fall of 2014, I had a 7th grader and a 5th grader, both involved in time-intensive activities and high-level academics. My husband was split between running the baseball/softball facility, coaching high school baseball at a local charter school (the only one in Central Texas to compete in UIL – so, no pressure!), and doing his best to sneak in hunting and fishing getaways with his dad and brother. I was working full time from home, consulting in marketing, development, and photography, and had just “retired” from serving in ministry with our church’s high school choir program after 12 years (sniff). It was the inaugural year of Today’s Teenager Family, and it hit me hard. Really, really hard.

On a Friday in early September, I returned from school drop off and sat in my kitchen wrestling with despair. What a week it had been, and yet, I couldn’t even pinpoint what it was that made it so. It just WAS a week! Every day seemed to bring some new and inexplicable challenge. After a lifetime keeping on the sunny side, my rosy glasses seemed perennially fogged. Sitting at the kitchen island, I told myself, “This will not do.”

I had been participating in the #100happydays instagram challenge in the hopes of continuing to focus daily on the good things of life. But it seemed I needed a bit of a boost. So, as I was looking for something to be happy about (and yes, I read that and cringe, but I’m just being truthful), I spotted my citron Kitchenaid mixer. I decided to make some cookies just because, and whipped together a batch of toffee brickle drop cookies from the Heath toffee bits bag. And you know? It worked. My despondency dissipated. I posted a picture on instagram and went about my day considerably lighter.

The following week, which played out much like the one before it, I woke up on Friday already determined to make cookies again. At the time, my oldest niece and I had an ongoing joke about hashtags, and in a flash of inspiration I searched the hashtag #FridayCookies. Thinking surely there would be hundreds of posts, I was surprised to find just a few, one being a bakery far away. No one was using it regularly, so I decided I would start. That very day.

When I picked the children up from school, I told them that I understood how difficult this season seemed to be for all of us. I knew that they were both facing big challenges at school, we were all feeling the effects of changing friendships, and sometimes it felt a little cloudy around the house. So, I was going to bake cookies every Friday. They were welcome to tell friends or neighbors. Or, we could just eat them ourselves. But no matter what happened in any given week, we would ALWAYS have something to look forward to on Friday. Cookies.

They reacted with an enthusiasm reminiscent of their pre-middle-school years, which was affirmation enough for me. From that Friday on, I baked. I generally stuck to favorites, but reserved the right to try something interesting from time to time. And I instagrammed virtually every one.

Did #FridayCookies take off? No, not really. My friend was right; it didn’t turn into the next big trend. When I say my friend completely missed the point, I mean this: I didn’t start the whole #FridayCookies thing to start a movement. I did it to build a connection in my own little family. My people were individually struggling with hard things, and it was showing up in our family dynamic. I only started with the hashtag because my oldest was on instagram, with my youngest soon following, and it was a way to reach them in their own language. And I think in many ways, it worked.

The advent of high school brought Friday night sports, which made #FridayCookies a bit harder to pull off, but we’ve kept it going most of the time. I don’t instagram them all anymore, and sometimes it’s more like #FridayCookiesOnTuesday. But after four years, my favorite Saturday breakfast is still two cups of coffee with a couple of #FridayCookies I stash away for this exact purpose. And every now and then, I see someone on social media decide to do their own #FridayCookies, and I say a quick prayer for their sweet family to enjoy that little connection as much as I have.