Pre-Christmas December

Blogger is giving me some trouble tonight, but maybe I'll be able to share a few pictures.

We baked cookies for the cookie exchange. Justus did the second coating of powdered sugar on the Mexican Wedding Cakes one night before bed. Yeah... he had to change pajamas 'cause -oof- that stuff is messy! :)



I took pictures at the cookie exchange.













This is the candle exchange part of the party. I don't like candles as much as everyone else in the world, so I don't participate in the candle exchange. :)




Jeremy hates Christmas music. However, while we were putting up the Christmas tree he allowed us to listen to a rather raucous CD of kids' Christmas music I bought for $1 last year. On came the song, "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer". And, as though on cue, we heard the garage door opening as Elaine was coming home. She came in the door and the children were singing along.... When the song ended she was still rubbing a spot on her leg, and she said, "That really hurt. I was coming in and hit my leg on the car." Natasha said, "Are you sure it wasn't a reindeer?"

I'm trying to get the children to start searching for answers to their questions instead of always just posing them to Jeremy and me. So when Justus asked, "How is eggnog made?" I answered, "Well, let's Google it." We did, and he read to me a recipe that included bourbon and rum. Of course he asked what bourbon and rum are, so I answered, "Oh, just different kinds of liquor. See how the recipe says they're 'optional', so we would, of course, leave them out if we were making this recipe." The next day on Skype with Sydni it came up in conversation and I wanted to test his memory so I asked him to tell Sydni as much of the recipe as he could remember. He said, "It has eggs, milk, sugar, and black licorice." (...grimacing along with you...) He misunderstood/recalled 'liquor' as 'licorice'!

FINALLY it got cold here. The first day the children were headed out to play in the snow Natasha was going to zip the warm liner into her winter coat, of which she had been using only the outer shell for the past six weeks. She said, "I have to put in the liner of my coat 'cause so far this year I've only been wearing the crust!"