I posted last year about my childhood memory of decorating Christmas cookies at my aunt’s house before Christmas. And I’m so happy that my sister likes to host this event so that Mallory can have the same memory.
We decorated like 400 dozen cookies today. That might be a *slight* exageration, but it did feel like a ton of cookies. And I even made excuses to NOT sit and decorate a ton of cookies (have to feed the baby, oops, now I have to change the baby, oh and Emily – do you have any clothes for Carson since he just peed out of his diaper? great – WAIT – you have a CLOSET full of 12-18mo boy clothes and I just spent money at the store on clothes for Carson? I guess I have to sort through these clothes – you guys have fun decorating!)
Anywho – it is a riot to watch little kids attempt to decorate cookies. My nephew just sat and ate all the cookies and my niece just sat and overloaded every single cookie with 14lbs of frosting & sprinkles. Mallory was in the middle of the spectrum – she nibbled and decorated but not as much as Lauren and Liam.
This is one of Mallory’s creations:
And this is what I had to clean up at Lauren’s station. My sister had the bright idea to have us decorate the cookies on wire cooling racks so that the extra stuff would fall through the rack. But apparently even though our dad is an engineer, we aren’t smart enough to think to put paper down on the table first. 
We had all those sugar cookies, and my sister made me my second favorite cookies (cornflake wreath cookies) and also my favorite cookies (peanut butter blossoms). But I can’t eat the peanut butter ones right now so it was sort of mean of her to make [and eat] those right in front of me!
I’m almost all done with my holiday photo editing. I have one more family picture that I need to swap out some closed eyes, etc. It’s been a crazy hectic week with all the work I had to do for my photography “business”, and it didn’t help that I was sick (I was finally diagnosed with a sinus infection) and Rick was gone all week (helping his mom move).
We had a fun night last night; swim class was cancelled so we just went to dinner. It was fun to catch up with Rick after the football season. I know we had Thanksgiving weekend for that but with me being sick and also busy snapping photos, it wasn’t easy for us to just relax.
I am very excited about being a normal family for a while, with Rick being home for dinner every night. Rick wasn’t even aware of how many teeth Carson is working on. So while I wish he was a little busy at work packing for the bowl trip, we need him at home.
So, I hope to not be so absent around here. See you soon!
Is there anything more perfect than that?