Merry Christmas 2012

Our Christmas wasn't so merry this year. When we were driving home from our day trip on Friday, DH called to say he was going to the doctor. Later he called to say he had the flu.  He spent the next 3 days in bed dying.  A ran a quick small fever and had a sore throat on Sunday. J woke up with a fever and upset stomach on Monday.

Before the illness spread, we managed to make Christmas cookies


On Christmas Eve our Christmas plans at the cousins' house were cancelled, we skipped mass and celebrated with the family via skype.




We decided to do a nice white elephant gift trade with the family. We skyped to the cousins, who in turn skyped to the Iowa cousins. With laptops facing each other, we were set.  It wasn't the clearest picture, but it worked. And I have Fran's Chocolate coming my way soon! Thanks S#1!

J rallied and we had a nice evening. I made a mexican food dinner since we were missing fajitas with the cousins. A made hot chocolate, the boys readied the cookies and carrots for Santa and the reindeer.






By Christmas Eve evening, I wasn't feeling so hot. I tried to pretend it was all in my head. I made cinnamon rolls for Christmas morning. I stayed up late to finish up last minute wrapping and get some laundry done.

By Christmas morning it was all I could do to sit upright and pretend to smile while gifts were opened.

Before


Frankie enjoying his new frog


After

DH & the kids (who had recovered) headed to the ILs house to celebrate. DH apologized for ruining my Christmas. I reminded him that I never get a chance to spend a quiet day in bed watching whatever I wanted and sleeping as much as I could.  A little flu wasn't going to ruin my opportunity. I watched the BBC miniseries North & South, the movie Sliding Doors and slept in between.

I almost slept through our white Christmas. DH sent some pictures of the kids playing, so I got up to look our our window and headed back to bed.










I spent about half of yesterday in bed. Today I'm up and moving. Kids are enjoying their presents, especially the air pogo. A knocked another item off the to-do-on-Christmas-break list, making crepes.








Hopefully the illness is over and we can enjoy the rest of our Christmas break. Unless I kill the children for asking again if we can go ice-skating/geo-caching/to-the-mall for the 800th time. Why did I ever let them make a to-do-on-Christmas-break list in the first place?

homemade oreos

The girls scouts came over yesterday for a meeting. They are working on their new cuisines badge. This meeting's requirement was making a processed food from scratch, so they made homemade oreo cookies.

I had a recipe from my Flour cookbook but it was complicated and required resting and refrigerating the dough, not possible in our hour long meeting.  Luckily I found this recipe from the Annie Eats blog.




I wasn't sure how it would go with 6 girls trying to bake a batch of cookies. It turned out fine. They all took turns measuring and mixing. They had fun rolling and squashing the cookies and didn't eat too much dough. The hardest part was probably waiting for the cookies to cool. Talk descended into who is the cutest couple in 6th grade (when did they start having "couples") to how overrated is Taylor Swift and what should Adele do with her hair? It is so funny because I remember their chatter from a year ago and it definitely has grown up.




Once they finished making their cookies, they were inhaled. I guess they were good. Next on the list, potluck supper with the girls making the dishes. We'll see how it turns out.