Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Christmas Fun - yeah I'm late.

I'm a little behind with posting the Christmas stories, but in my defense, it's been a rather busy month. Malia and I headed up to the parents on December 22nd and stayed through January 2nd. It was really nice to get to spend a lot of time with the family. I even got to do quite a bit of shopping and just hanging with my baby sister which I haven't done in a long time. Yes Kami, you are still my baby sister, even though you are married with 1 1/4 kids. haha The best part for me over the holidays was learning that both my sisters are having babies! I get to be an aunt twice this year. They were also thoughtful in including my brother and I in some fashion. Kami is due on JC's birthday and Krissy is due the day before my birthday. I hope they both enjoy their crappy miserable pregnant summers. =) Love you guys.

I've digressed as usual. So, the days preceding Christmas were mostly spent wrestling children and baking. I made caramels which kinda went wonky, but ended up tasting all right. I also made some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and some sugar/butter cookies. I am pretty sure my mother nearly keeled over with delight after having some of the sugar/butter cookies because they tasted just like Lorna Doone shortbread cookies which are her favorite in the whole world. She even asked me for the recipe which tells you how much she liked them seeing as it's an understatement to say she does not care for baking/cooking. It's a necessary evil to her I think.

So, armed with much snackery, we had our family party Christmas Eve. We do all the family presents with all of us kids and our kids and significant others if applicable. Unfortunately JC, Carin and Zenock weren't able to come for Christmas because he just had to use his money/time to come back in August for some crazy dude's wedding. Oh yeah, that crazy dude just happens to be JCs best friend and who his son is named after. I guess that is okay. Just don't let it happen again. You're lucky it happened to be the same time as Malia's birthday so she settled for that. Anyway, we opened all the presents and to my delight Malia went crazy for her computer. She declared it the best Christmas ever and once I downloaded some games spent most of the rest of the holiday playing on her computer. Viva la eBay for finding stuff like this! The picture to the left pretty much sums up about 50% of her Christmas vacation.








The other 50% was split between playing with her cousins and playing with the presents that Santa brought her. Santa brought her some more magnetix and a cupcake baking set. Not one of those where you have to buy all sorts of pre-made packages of stuff, a real set with measuring cups, mixing bowls, silicone baking sheet and a recipe book. We made cupcakes Christmas Day. She was beyond excited to make cupcakes. I helped a little with the mixing and putting the batter in the muffin baking silicone, but she did most of it all by herself.






She also spent some of that time building stuff with her magnetix. She built a turtle and a hot air balloon for a mini-barbie that Haylee brought over.




















All in all it was an excellent Holiday vacation even though Malia wouldn't try my mom's WONDERFUL shrimp cocktail that she makes every year for New Year's.

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