Wednesday, December 28, 2016

12 Days Of Christmas - Day 8 - Baking & Christmas Lights!

Day 8 was our day to bake cut-out sugar cookies. We always have a fun decorating day with Kim and her kids so we were making these to use the next day. 



All of the kids got to help mix! 



I'm seriously amazed at how well it has gone this year in regards to having the kids help me in the kitchen. It really has been so much fun and a true joy!



Stir, stir, stir! 



Almost there! I had to finish up the stirring since the dough was getting harder to stir. 



I have never actually made cut-out cookies with my kids. I know that's weird, but it's so much easier to just do the drop cookies. 



Jackson was the one that got all the cookie cutters out so we could see the selection. I actually had quite a few. 



I let each of the kids cut out one cookie and then they got to come back and do another one. 




We just kept going around and around like that until the dough had to be rolled out again and then I pretty much finished out the cookies.  



We had enough cookies for 4 cookie sheets! 



We had presents, candy canes, Rudolph, snowmen, hearts, trees, stars, butterflies and penguins which I'm now pretty sure were just chicks. 



When I went to take Ella's picture she was holding the tray up like it was sign. I about freaked out since I was sure the cookies were going to come sliding down! 



Love having my sweet helpers! 



Jack and I wanted to figure out how many cookies each kid would get so we wrote it out. Kim has 3 kids and we have 4 so there were 7 kids total and 38 cookies. At first I wrote it out like I would have done when I was growing up, but I figured we should try use one of the methods that Jack has learned in school. We drew circles to represent people and then just went from person to person adding a tally mark. We ended up with each kid getting 5 cookies and then there were 3 cookies left. I know some people are super against Common Core, but I love it. I love how it gives the kids several different ways to get to the same answer! 



Watching the cookies bake! 



Ella decided all on her own to write this letter. She only needed help with the words Pa, Ga-Ga, Family, Aunt Stephie and Uncle Ry. So proud of my girl! 



Cookies done and cooling off! 



After the cookies were done I decided we should bring down all the Legos and have fun building some of our sets. Every year at this time I have this desire to build with Legos. I think it's because the kids are home and the weather outside isn't very nice. While we were building we were able to watch all 3 Santa Clause movies. 



After dinner I made hot chocolate and we headed out to a neighborhood we always go to every year to look at lights. I had found these cool Christmas Light Scavenger Hunt pages on Facebook and printed them out. This is probably our 5th year going and this year we finally remembered that they have a bin for a food drive and we brought some canned food! 

  

The scavenger pages really made the whole experiences that much better. The kids were really on the lookout for things on our list! 



There were quite a few houses in the neighborhood that weren't lite up. One of my favorites from years past was completely dark. They always decorated their entire house and property in white lights and it was always so gorgeous! I'm not sure if they moved or if they just decided not to do it this year, but it was sad! 



There were still a lot of houses that really were all decked out and looked gorgeous though! 





My sweet family! 



When we were all done there were only 4 things we weren't able to find.....The Grinch, the word Noel, a house with 5 reindeer and a camel! 



Warming up with our hot chocolate! 



Time to head home! 



Once we got home we got back to working on Legos and Charlie wanted to be right in the middle of all the fun! 

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