{home sweet (cold) home}

It was definitely a little shocking to the system to return to such chilly weather, but it is nice to be home. We had a GREAT time on the cruise. I have a TON of pics to share. So many that I am not going to do that in a single post. It was just be too much. What I have done is broken it down day by day. So Monday, I will have my normal post, but I will also post one post from the first day of the cruise. I have back dated the blog entries so they will show up on the actual days they occurred. I will include a link to the backdated post. I will do that every day until I am all caught up. So hold tight, I will get you all caught up in the next week. Internet access was not a luxury we had on the cruise. We weren't willing to pay the 75 cents a minute to use it.

Today was all about unpacking, grocery shopping, and trying to get back to normal. Did you know that Christmas is less than two weeks away?! Yep. I need to get on that. I have pretty much all of my shopping done, but I need to do a ton of wrapping. I don't want to wait too long to start that. One fun thing I did today was make a tasty treat for Alexis' cousin Christmas party. I decided to make holiday morsel cookies (nice and chewy) with some buttercream frosting sandwiched between the cookies. Luckily for my waistline, I couldn't eat them. Still gluten-free for me! The kids let me know that they were good. They were my taste-testers. Here is what the finished product looked like:

 

All packed up and ready to go!

The kids and I also met Ryan after his class finished up yesterday for a nice Christmas gathering. They had snacks and some nice activities for the kids. One thing they had was cookie coloring. The LOVED this. Here is Lilli with her cookie:

 

We forgot to get a pic of Caden with his cookie, but it was impressive. He worked on it for over 20 minutes! He even wrote words on it. Too funny...

Until later!
Barby