Christmas Eve

What a relaxing Christmas Eve. Ryan and I made sure we completed just about everything before Christmas Eve, so we could spend the day enjoying our time with the girls, relaxing and having fun. We all enjoyed a yummy Chick-fil-a breakfast, and I told Lily we were going to make cookies for Santa. For the next hour or so, she asked me every couple of minutes if we were ready to make cookies. I kept explaining we were going to wait for Mia to go down for her nap, but she was so excited to get started. I gave her all the cookie cutters so she could see the different shapes. She kept looking at them and changing her mind on which one she would make first. Finally, Mia went down for her nap, so it was time for us to make the cookies.

First things first, we have to wash our hands.
Then we needed to preheat the oven. Lily likes to push the buttons to hear them beep.
Now comes the fun part. We measured out the flour, baking powder and baking soda. Lily enjoyed pouring the ingredients into the bowl and then mixing them together.

So excited to be making cookies!

Watching intensely as I cream the sugar and butter. She was fascinated by the mixer.

Using the mixer with a little help from Mommy.

She decided to make the snowflake her first cookie. Here she is pressing the cutter into the dough. We were able to get a few cutters at a time on the dough, and then we would roll it back out and do it again.

Having fun!

A picture of all the unbaked cookies on the cookie sheet. She made one of each design and then we made an "L" too.

While the first batch cooked, we rolled the rest of the dough into little circles and flattened them out; we also made the letters "D," "M" and "A" for the rest of us.

Concentrating on rolling out her dough.

Okay, so I love to cook. However, I am not a baker in the least. I love baked goods, don't get me wrong, I just don't do it very often. I say this to explain why I didn't think about the fact that the cookies would really expand while they cooked. They came out of the oven huge! Most were mashed together too. Lily didn't care though, and to be honest, they tasted really good. She had so much fun decorating them. First, we put a little frosting on each one. Then Lily used our 6 different colors of sugar sprinkles and rainbow non-perils to decorate. She used all seven items on each one. She would carefully choose the order she wanted to decorate each cookie with too; it was pretty fun to watch her because she was having such a great time.

She chose to decorate the candy cane first. Here's what it looked like.

Ready to dig in! She enjoyed every bite!

Of all the cookies, Lily wanted to give Santa the big "M" one. We frosted it, and then she decorated it. First the green sugar in the middle, then yellow sugar on the bottom of each side, blue sugar a little above the yellow, purple above the blue, pink next to the purple and orange between the pink and green. She decided not to use the non-perils on this one. It was interesting to see how she wanted everything to be symmetrical. I wonder where she gets that from...

After we made the cookies, we enjoyed the rest of our day. Here's a picture of Mia relaxing with Ryan later in the day.

After we put Mia to bed for the night, we let Lily hang our stockings. We hadn't put them up because the hangers are really heavy and would have hurt Mia or Lily a lot if they had pulled the stockings over.

Here's Lily putting Santa's cookie by the fireplace; we put the milk down a minute later.

We also had to put some water out for the reindeer. It was raining, so Lily choose to stay inside and watch.

One last picture before bed time. She is such a sweet little girl.

We're looking forward to a great Christmas tomorrow!