Scenes of Christmas



Setting up the tree.




Helping Daddy with the lights.




Daddy decorated Cim. She begged us to hang ornaments off her for the next week.




Our tree and presents on Christmas morning. (Half of the gifts are from the Dollar Tree or tag sales--shh!)




Cimorene discovers her stocking. It had a bear, which meant she automatically loved it.




"Look what I found! Can I keep it?"




Daddy got a stocking too. Santa was sneaky, so he had no idea he was getting one.




Santa's belly and red robe had nothing on mine!




The stocking stuffers were all Cim really needed for the day. Birds, a cat, and a glitter wand. Oh yeah.




Our pondering princess. She put the headbands on herself.




I'm not sure what she's trying to turn that bird into, but apparently it's not working.




Ryan had fun wrapping.




I loved his decorations. This box held the traditional bag of Doritos. :-D




"You better watch out..." --This song has never seemed so appropriate.

 

As an extra gift to me, Ryan changed the poopy diaper. Cimorene didn't care what was going on--she had her toys.



Castle Cakes

The other day I was a at a tag sale and found a cake pan that I had to have. Now, normally cake pans don't have that kind of magnetism for me; I usually don't make more than one or two cakes a year, so why would I bother buying lots of pans? This pan, however, was a Nordic Ware castle pan.

When I showed it to Ryan he got really excited, because apparently his class has had a running joke about one of the guys having a castle. We decided that the first castle cake should go to his class.

I was really worried about getting the cake out of the pan, so I watched a video of tips on the Nordic Ware website first. This was our first attempt:

It came out a little dark, so we decided we'd eat that one and try again for his class. This was our second attempt:

His class loved it, and we felt validated for our efforts. The next day he came home and said they were having a pot-luck at school for about 60 people this weekend, and he had told them he'd bring a castle cake. For that many people, though, he thought we should probably do two. We grabbed a box of red velvet mix and one of dark chocolate. Here's what we got:

So what have I learned from this? That a really awesome cake pan has the power to turn a 1-or-2-cakes-per-year person into a 4-cakes-in-three-days person.

I also learned that it's time for me to buy a set of medieval legos. These cakes are just begging for knights and dragons.