Getting Ready

Yesterday was pretty busy. It was Daddy's birthday so he got up early and went shopping - bought himself a new laptop after weeks of research. My sister came over to bake Christmas cookies so we spent the afternoon in the kitchen. The boys got to make a gingerbread house- hopefully a new tradition. It was kind of a fiasco - the pieces kept breaking and the kids couldn't get the candy to stick the way they wanted it, but they had fun and ate a bunch so it was fine. Then Daddy took the boys sledding. They were only gone for about 45 minutes, but they said they had fun. Meanwhile we made a whole bunch of different cookies and only burned one batch and one hand (mine). They look great and I can't wait to share them this weekend at our family Christmas parties. The one funny thing that happened was when we went to roll out the sugar cookies, we couldn't find a rolling pin. I swear I've used a rolling pin in my house before, but I can't actually remember needing it so we decided that no, I've never owned a rolling pin. We ended up using a drinking glass.

After all that we went to Daddy's Christmas party for his work at the Discovery Center. We only stayed long enough to see santa and play for a few minutes because we still needed to eat dinner. Oh, and they gave the boys each $10 gift cards for Toys R Us. That was nice. So then we drove over to Chili's for dinner. {I forgot to mention we were doing all this in the middle of a pretty good snowstorm.} Daddy was super excited to get to use the 4 wheel drive in his truck while we all hung on for dear life.

This morning we got up and started doing some major cleaning in the basement in preparation for the new TV coming in. Our office area is just despicable, but I got some of that cleaned and the TV area organized. Daddy went out for some containers, I thought, but was gone for four hours. My sister helped clear the driveway that we hadn't shoveled yet this season, and then she helped me carry the old entertainment center up to the garage. She certainly earned her keep this weekend, I'm sure she was very excited about getting to sleep in at our peaceful house this morning :).

I have two more days of school before the Holidays- and three Christmas parties. I'm looking forward to them, though, because the kids are just so excited. Tomorrow I have to get some gifts for just in case someone forgets about the gift exchange.

Okay- funnies: Ben said "Mommy, I can speak Spanish. Listen." He leaned in to whisper in my ear: "Ssspanish."

Joey was thinking about where all the helium balloons have gone that they have lost to the sky. He said: "maybe they went up to the planet that has rings around it and when the planet spun around it popped them. Or maybe they flew all the way to Pluto!"