If you give a mouse a cookie

One book I loved to read to my kids when they were little -- and one they loved to have read to them -- was “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie.”

The story, if you don’t know already, revolves around a mouse who wants a cookie. And if you give him a cookie, he’ll want some milk to drink with the cookie. And if you give him some milk, he’ll want a straw to drink the milk. And so on.

My Baby Boomer version of that book is called “If You Buy New Appliances For The Kitchen.”

My wife and I are empty-nesters and reached that stage where the kitchen appliances -- the fridge, the dishwasher, and the cook-top stove and range -- needed replacing.

We think we’ll probably age in place here for a while, but our appliances age back to the Pleistocene era.

Being frugal New Englanders, we lived for a long time with a fridge that had a broken condenser, at least I think that’s what it was. Water was dripping on the inside of the unit and collecting at the bottom under the crisper drawers. Putting a towel under the crisper drawers to collect the water was getting old.

Our dishwasher was something that was loud enough to drown out the television in the living room plus any hope of conversation.

Three of four burners worked on the cook-top stove. There are basically two settings for the burners -- boiling hot or simmer hot. The idea of medium-high heat seems to get lost in the translation.

We have to slam the door of our oven in order to activate the electronics to set the cooking temperature, and I really question just how accurate the temperature is.

And we lost the heat resistant glass on the oven door about four Thanksgivings ago.

So now that the kitchen appliance make-over is in full operation -- just in time for a houseful of people at Christmas -- we’re thinking that now that we have a cookie, we might need a glass of milk.

The appliances are stainless steel. The hardware to our cabinets is gold colored. We need replacements to match the appliances.

And the kitchen counter is just contrary to the new look.

We need some nice New Hampshire granite, right?

And the kitchen abuts what is now the living room, but we’re thinking with such a nice kitchen it would be nice to have a dining room for those big family dinners we like to host when the kids are around.

But if we turn the living room into a dining room, we need a new living room, which we could do if we create an addition off the back of the house where the deck is now.

And so on ...

Oh, and my mother says if we get a new flat cook-top stove we’ll need all new cookware.

I’m not sure that’s true, but if you give a mouse a cookie, after all.