She's a Softie

Today was awesome for me. This morning, my pal Tara and I performed the mighty Kid Swap - she brought her two boys over and went to do some shopping by herself (with her baby...she's a busy gal!). After an hour and half she returned, and I took off. I spent some quality time in the Target aisles, picking up the last of my Christmas gifts. Then I blasted through the grocery store, finding everything I needed! I kept making the mental note, "Bacon Bits are with the salad stuff," which saved me at least 15 minutes of searching.

After lunch, we (Mom and I) frosted while Ben and Leah did most of the decorating. And boy, did those cookies get decorated. The trick with those two is to grab the cookie off their plates before they cross the line to overdone, but most of the time we were too slow. Ben kept getting ahead of us and wanted to decorate unfrosted cookies. Leah enjoyed eating all the extra sprinkles off the plates at the end. She asked Ruth to pass her another plate, in a voice that sounded frighteningly similar to a crack addict's.

A word about these cookies we decorated - the recipe is my mom's sour cream cut-out cookie recipe, which she's asked me not to post on the blog! I made a double batch. Towards the end of the dough-mixing process, I realized that I've probably never made a double batch before, because the dough was climbing out of the bowl! I had to dump it all on my cutting board work area, divide it in two, and mix the last half of the flour in by hand. Knead, dump flour, knead again, try to roll out, dump more flour.... and repeat. Then cut out all the shapes and bake...The entire process took about 2 hours.

I'd had enough of the kitchen, so we ordered pizza for dinner. Then had friends over to watch Wall-E, a gift from Aaron's sister Stephanie - Thanks, guys!

We tried to watch Kung-Fu Panda with the kids a couple weeks ago, but it was too scary and we quit about 45 minutes into it. Should have known better, since it was rated PG and had kung-fu in the title! Aaron and I finished it another time, and were glad we stopped when we had.

Anyway, Wall-E is rated G, so we tried again. Once I coerced Ben to come sit on my lap to watch instead of standing in the hallway, things were fine...until the conflict of the movie was at it's peak (Wall-E is stuck in the big plant holding contraption on the ship, and Eve is trying to rescue him while the Captain is battling the autopilot). That's when Leah demanded that we turn it off and started crying. And I realized she's exactly like me...she wasn't really scared, just emotionally involved. I tried to reassure her that it would end happy, and didn't she want to see how?

She came and sat with Aaron and managed to get through the rest of it, with a few comments from me on how funny the humans are in the movie - they can't even walk on their own feet! How silly is that! She cried a little after it was done, just like her mother -she was still processing through her thoughts and feelings.

Hopefully we all get some good sleep tonight, with no bad dreams to interfere...it's all a big experiment, this parenting thing.

No photos today...sorry! Maybe tomorrow? I have a ton of cookie photos I want to share in one post.

Merry (almost!) Christmas!