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.

That Time Santa Almost Didn't Have A Gift To Bring

We'll get this out in the open now: I'm a procrastinator. Like a "let's stop by the store on the way to the party, grab a gift, and I'll wrap it in my lap" type person. So it should come to no one's surprise that I wait until Christmas Eve to wrap presents. It's a tradition now (as we have friends come over to help us wrap, read about that here) and one of my favorites at that. However, there's been plenty of moments where I didn't think we'd make it. Santa has had so many 'oh shit!' moments over the last ten years that I completely forgot about them until I caught this SNL clip: 

The scene with the playhouse perfectly depicts our Christmas Eve's. We've had many moments like that, two involving playhouses specifically.

One year I made a last minute trip to Target the day before Christmas Eve. I grabbed a bunch of toys that I didn't look closely at. I'm pretty good about making sure all toys and items I get for presents come with all accessories needed (batteries, apps for electronics, etc.). One toy that I grabbed was a blow up log cabin play house. It was advertised as the perfect indoor playhouse for winter. At only $20 I was willing to give it a try.

I'm not sure what I was thinking when I grabbed it, but I definitely did not think about how it would get blown up. Cut to 11:30 p.m. Christmas Eve. We take it out of the box and Hubs innocently asks, "where's the pump?"

Me: "Huh?"

Hubs: "The pump to blow it up with. It comes separately. Did you buy it?"

Me: "Ooooohhh....don't we have a pump we could use?" I acted as though this had been my plan all along. It didn't take him long to figure out that I had no plan.

Hubs: "No, you broke that last month."

Me: "Oops."

Hubs: "I'll try our bike pump."

Now, that would have been an excellent solution minus the fact that I broke that one too. Our friends finally arrived after Christmas mass and we all took turns blowing this thing up. We were red faced, from both drinking wine and blowing up a freaking playhouse, and laughed hysterically most of the night, in between snapping at each other because we still had three other toys to put together before we could go to bed. 

Our saving grace came after 1 a.m. when my in-laws lent us their old bike pump (ironically, I broke this pump as well trying to blow up another toy several months later). We made it to bed by 4 a.m. only to be woken up just after 5 a.m. by our two boys. We were exhausted that day.....and that playhouse lasted only one week.

The next year I wised up and bought a large Little Tikes playhouse. I bought it months prior to the holiday season and stored it in our shed in the backyard. It was impossible for the kids to get into the shed by themselves so I knew they wouldn't be seeing it. Perfect hiding place (in my mind at least)!

Cut to Christmas Eve. It's cold and we had gotten plenty of snow already that year. The minis were soundly sleeping in bed and we were nearly done with our wrapping before 10 p.m. That's impressive for us. I was excited to actually get some sleep on Christmas Eve. When the last small gift was wrapped I sent Hubs out to the shed to grab the playhouse so we could put it together.

He came in wide eyed moments later.

"Where is it?" I questioned.

"I need some hot water."

"Huh?" I responded, very confused.

"The playhouse is stuck."

"Again, huh?"

"The shed is frozen shut and I get even get the doors open."

The big Christmas present was locked in the shed because the doors were FROZEN SHUT. The next hour and a half was spent running hot bowls of water out and pouring it all around the shed doors. Hubs had to run to the one store that was open on Christmas Eve and grab more ice melt. That finally did the trick. It took the two of us pulling at the doors and kicking ice off the hinges to finally open the shed doors.

The next 2+ hours was a blur of cursing, whiskey pouring, laughing with friends as we took turns beating the screws into the house, moments of panic when the pounding woke up two kids, and tears when we saw our friends off at 2:30 a.m. and we still had a house to clean (aka-get rid of the packaging evidence).

I was almost certain that Santa wouldn't be bringing her gift those years. There's been some close calls wondering if we'd get everything put together in time. But all of those close calls not having the Santa gift ready to go was so worth the frustration and sleepless night after seeing this:

The past couple of years the big huge gifts, like playhouses and kitchens, have lessened as the minis age. Now we really focus on experience gifts.....and also because Santa has been banned from buying those big ticket items that require hours of assembly.