Christmas Cookies and Tacky Lights

Some of you may know that John's family has a sugar cookie recipe that has been around for generations. How the Virginia Schmitt's are the ones carrying on the tradition is beyond me, but we've gotten pretty good at them. Hopefully we make the family proud.

This year we decided to make John Grayson a more active participant in the two day process. John and I made the dough on Tuesday night (god bless the KitchenAide mixer) and then JGray helped make cookies and decorate them on Wednesday night. Since the last day of school was Thursday, we were on a pretty tight timeline to have the cookies made and wrapped.

Not only do we have a future singer on our hands, but we may also have a future chef. JGray was very good at spreading flour and making the perfect amount of mess, although we're not sure if more flour ended up on his shirt or on the cookies.

Here are a few photos from our baking bonanza:

Fun with flour. Note that the shirt is still relatively clean (but not for long).

Still having fun, although he's wearing a lot more flour at this point in the evening.

Tasting the final product. Is it me or does he remind you of that mom in the Rice Krispie treats commercial who throws flour on her face to make it look like she worked hard??

We also decided to do our own mini Tacky Lights tour on Saturday night. We substituted chocolate milk for hot chocolate and brought a few of our masterpiece cookies along for the adventure. John Grayson loved looking at the lights. There were lots of "Ooooh"s and "Oh"s coming from the back seat. His favorite part was the house that you could get out and walk around to see the lights. Daddy has his work cut out for him next year if he's going to be able to impress JGray :-)

Since this may be the last blog posting before Christmas, we wish a very Merry Christmas to all of our friends and family. To our family in Chicago, we will definitely miss you but will not miss all of that snow and those freezing temperatures!