Day 17

Today our Advent Activity coincided with celebrating Ryan, my brother-in-law's birthday. Jenna and her family, my parents, and my grandma all came over for pizza and to decorate the 120 or so cookies that I had baked--that was 8 sticks of butter, 8 egg yolks, and 9 cups of flour. I am going to put in another plug for a Kitchen Aid Professional Series 6 Quart mixer that could have done that in one batch as opposed to the two batches I needed to make.

I felt little stress today because normally I make the frosting right before we start and then end up having to make 2 or 3 more batches during and I don't get to have fun decorating. This time I made a huge batch before everyone came over. I wish I would've thought of doing that 2 years ago when we started this tradition. Sometimes I am a little slow. I may have also been a little less stressed than normal because I dipped into my airplane prescription of Xanax....maybe.

The kids did a great job decorating, and I was only a little scary. I may have thrown a tiny temper tantrum because when I opened the tins of cookies there were quite a few broken ones. But, I think I was justified. If you had spent two days mixing, rolling, cutting and baking cookies, you'd be irritated if they broke too. But honestly, it was a relatively calm and fun experience. This year all of the kids helped--even the babies. I think Noah enjoyed it the most though! This is a tradition that I hope we do as a whole family for years to come.

That thing on the bottom right, was Bill's contribution--it's a Star Wars ship--don't ask me which one, all I know is it's not  the Millennium Falcon