Baking for Christmas

Baking for Christmas!
This year Christmas was especially fun for Ella and I in the kitchen!

Gingerbread Man Cookies!


She loves to help scoop and pour in ingredients and she is very good with the rolling pin and cookie cutter! We have a story book with the gingerbread man story in it so she was very excited to bake her very own gingerbread men. We also make gingerbread girls, snowmen, Christmas trees and a few other things.

We just had to have a taste (or two) of the icing!

Ella's favorite part was putting on the sprinkles. At the beginning she sort of just dumped them in one spot but by the time we were done with 70 some cookies, her sprinkling techniques improved tremendously! The cookies are done! We made some for Ella to take to her Sunday school class and share with her friends and the rest were for friends and us of course!

This is what Lucas did when he was awake while we were baking! We planned to do most during his morning nap but he seemed to enjoy watching us when he was there!

And my favorite... Chocolate Kiss Cookies!

Ella rolled the cookie dough balls in the sugar and placed them on the cookie sheet.

All done! She had just touched the corner of a hot pan so she wasn't too excited about the cookies at this point... More concerned about her burn.

I was curious to see how she would eat one of these... Cookie first or Chocolate. I should have known. She licked the chocolate right off before even a bite of the cookie! It put the cutest dot of chocolate on her chin that she could not reach with her tongue!

One more baking tradition...

On Christmas Eve we went to Grandmama's house so she could show Ella how to make cinnamon rolls! That was lots of fun too! She got to roll the dough and her new sprinkling skills came in very handy with the cinnamon.

Yes, of course, we had Oreo Cookie Pie too but Ella didn't get in on that one this year. Next year she can be in charge of smashing Oreos!

Our New Van!!

The "New" Family Van!!

The Story:
On December 5th Brian told me we needed to do some Christmas shopping down at the Wellington Mall. I, of course, was up for that... I like that mall a lot! So we take the turnpike south and he gets off at Okeechobee when we really needed to go to the next exit for the mall. I commented that he exited too early and he said he had gone that way before and it would get us there also. So we drove over this overpass and see this HUGE car dealership and as we were talking about how bit it was he turns in to the lot. Now we did not have time to do this "Christmas shopping" because we had dinner plans with friends. He said we were just going to look for 10 minutes and although I didn't think we really had the time I did like the idea. We head towards the showroom and stop at a silver can parked out front and he said "hey, this one looks nice". I started to look at it and thought so too. He couldn't wait more than a minute before bursting out to say "It's YOURS!" I honestly didn't believe him at first. I thought what I must have really heard was this is what we'll be looking to get someday in the future. He explained the whole story to me and finally I began to believe that we were actually taking this very van home with us that day! I have never NEVER been so surprised in my whole life. SO AWESOME!

God is so good to us! Just earlier that day as we were packing up the kids, diaper bag, stroller, etc into our little Focus Brian maid comment (knowing full well what was happening in just hours) that we don't even have anywhere to put any Christmas gifts we would buy. We really did need more space in a vehicle. We also have been talking about a road trip to Indiana this summer and I thought MAYBE I would be able to convince him that we NEEDED our own van for that trip. I had not even a though that my prayers for patience would come to an end so soon.

All loaded up and ready to go!


12-30-08 ~ Almost a month later and you can see how comfortable the kids are in our wonderful van! Both fell asleep with Christmas toys in their laps! Ella still often says "I love our van! It's awesome!"

The moral of the story is: Waiting over two years was well worth it! Thank you Brian and Praise our Faithful Father!