Christmas Week

Wow, were we ever busy for the holidays! Here's most of our week in review, but without the pics. Those will follow soon.

Tuesday after work, Lane and I met up with Cynthia, Christianne and Gabriela at the Botanical Gardens. It’s always beautiful at the botanical gardens, but this time we also got to admire holiday decorations and listen to live jazz music. Gabriela loved the music. She stood right in front of the musicians, watching them play their instruments. Sometimes she even danced around, clapped and said “Bravo” when they finished their songs.

Wednesday Lane and I both took the day off from work. After breakfast, we all got bundled up and went outside for yet another attempt to create a snowman. It was a great success, as you can see from the previous post. Frostella made a beautiful snow woman. Later that afternoon, Christianne and I went on a date. We went ice skating at Pentagon Row and neither of us fell at all – not even once! I decided we should go pro. After warming up with a post-skating drink at Starbucks, we headed to Sur la Table to pick out Christmas cookie cutters and other sugar cookie decorating supplies. We got home and got to work baking goodies – in one afternoon we made rice krispie treats with red and green sprinkles, peanut butter chocolate fudge, and mint brownies with chopped up Andes Mints throughout. Mmmmm, they were a hit! We relaxed that evening with some Planet Earth video watching and played games. Christianne and I also brought down a plate of goodies to the front desk at our apartment building where the lady exclaimed that she would be “fat as a pig by January”.

Thursday – Christmas Eve. Uncle Lane went to work for most of the day, but I took another vacation day. Wow, Thursday was busy. We baked Lemon Bars and Sugar cookies, had loads of fun decorating sugar cookies, played more games, I made butternut squash soup, and even had a Christmas eve dinner mishap. I started cooking Carnitas in the crock pot first thing in the morning. Us girls went to the grocery store, where we each picked out some food to donate to the local food pantry, and bought it with our own money. Then, we took a trip to the food pantry to drop off our donations. When we got back, I checked on the crockpot and it wasn’t even hot. Emergency! Something happened to the outlet and the meat wasn’t cooking. I moved the carnitas and got them started up again, but they were nowhere NEAR being done by dinner time. ENTER Kabob Palace. We took everyone’s order and brought back take out for Christmas eve dinner. At first I was mortified that we had takeout on such a festive occasion. But let’s be honest, it was amazing and I was exhausted. We got to focus on decorating cookies together as a family instead of me being away from everyone while getting even more tired and making a bigger mess in the kitchen.

More to come on Christmas day and Tamale Madness Saturday.