Late Night Musings and Sugar Cookies

Not quite sure where my head is these days...Still thinking occasionally of our friends in Rwanda, quite glad to be over the strangeness of jet-lag, and now finding myself thrust into the holidays, baking cookies and reading Advent stories with my beautiful children.

My mom flew back home yesterday, after staying with us for a month.  I have a room full of my young adult children tonight; they all want to talk.  About their fantastic night helping out at Operation Christmas Child.  About their job. About college plans.  About how printers are still as lame as they always have been.  The contractors will be here this week, to hopefully start on the drywall.  We have lovely snow outside, and it's been really cold.

Hoping very much for a bit of normalcy in the next season of our lives.   I don't really know what that means, but it just sounds really good to imagine life outside the whirlwind for a bit! No selling houses, no moving, no remodeling, no international trips. Not for a while, anyway.  Please say yes, dear husband?

Here are some pics from our super-fun cookie decorating day.  I remember when my older children were small, and I most assuredly had an infant and another baby on the way. Oh my goodness, I would make a different Christmas goodie with each child.  All in one day.  And then I would leave the dishes in the sink and drag myself up to my room and play dead for a long, long time.

But we learn, don't we? I'm smarter now.  Only one kind of Christmas goodie at a time!

We like our sugar cookies extra soft around here.  I got this recipe from allrecipes.com

My 76 year-old mother, making the 'pretty' cookies that we'll save for later.  We'll eat the 'creative, interesting, and well-intentioned' ones now!

Emma, in the hat she just knit, with the cookie she just decorated but is about to eat.

We felt sorry for these clowns, so we let them in.

Beautiful Hannah got quite creative this year!

Doesn't this picture just take you back to elementary school?

My quiet watcher, Ellie, ready for Mommy to put down the camera so she can eat 'the prettiest one'.