Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Cookie Decorating Weekend


I'm just a bit behind in my posts. The weekend before Christmas weekend was a big one for our family. For the first time in the 13 years Matt and I have been together, he had a weekend off in December! We decided to take him to (and do) some of our favorite holiday things in the Metro. 

 You may remember my rant about Elizabeth and her Amazon Echo (read about it here). She earned it back and the new sign for her room arrived. She was one happy girl on Friday evening.


When you can't get your own boots off (mostly because it's the end of the week and you're done trying) so your brother helps you. Elizabeth echos how I feel every Friday evening.


 I discovered this picture on my phone. Apparently some little girl (named Elizabeth) had my phone and drew on some pictures. She thinks it's beautiful.


Friday nights are perfect nights for pizza, especially when it's your favorite deep dish pizza from Chicago! Each year in December, Hubs receives part of his gift early: pizzas directly from our favorite location of Pizano's in Chicago. This year he also got fried fruit pies from Arbuckle Mountain Fried Pies in Davis, OK. One of our favorite things about traveling is the local discoveries. The only downside is that we can't indulge in some of our favorites because they're so far away. Luckily there's shipping and businesses eager to make some extra money during the holidays!

Hubs works for The UPS Store so his Decembers are busy. The pizzas (and this year the pies) are always a nice treat for all of us (I usually have to take over all kid related things, household chores, and running the household single-handedly for the entire month)!

A video of the cat trying to get to another cat on the other side of the window. Our male cat, Doc, is extremely territorial and would be hissing and uncontrollable. Then there's Sophia, who is more curious and would like to get to the other cat before she judges. She kept the minis and myself entertained for a while early Saturday morning.

Our Saturday went like this: typical Saturday morning coffee date at Caribou, the Winter Market downtown, annual holiday open house at the World Food Prize Hall of Laureates, cookie decorating and tacos at Grandma and Grandpa Harmeyer's, and ending the night looking at Christmas lights.





Caroling, cookies, Santa, and my favorite building in Des Moines makes this my favorite holiday event. We usually don't stay as long to go through each room due to the crowds, but we stay long enough to see our favorite exhibits and pieces in the building.




At night during the holidays, the garden is lit up with Christmas lights.


This was the first year of cookie decorating that the minis didn't lose interest two cookies in. Instead everyone took their time decorating and there was even a winning cookie chosen at the end! Some of the cookies got a bit naughty (ahem, the candlestick turned into a male organ), but the winner was Hub's Charlie Brown cookie.







Anytime that you can follow up cookies with tacos is winning in my book!

Since we had such a busy Saturday, we chose to stick around home on Sunday. The minis played and cleaned their rooms before our Christmases began. It was a pretty laid back day that was needed before the last week of school, work, and holiday shenanigans.


I really have no idea what they were doing here in this picture or even what they had been eating, but seeing Elizabeth sitting on both of her brother's chairs instead of sitting in her own made me laugh.



The best part of making and decorating cookies is taking PLENTY home to eat!


Perfect weekend leading up to Christmas.