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I know, you've all been dying to find out if I finished Margaret's birthday peg dolls in time for Christmas.
Well worry no more!
Her favorite book is our copy of Little Red Riding Hood written and illustrated by Trina Hyman--please don't get some other Red Riding Hood picture book. This is the best one. The illustrations are amazing and I based the dolls off of them. Obviously. And if you're buying books you probably want to grab St. George and the Dragon too, also illustrated by Hyman. It's perfection.
Those pegs were the only handmade Christmas gift I managed this year, besides stringing some beads on floral wire to decorate a dollhouse Christmas tree and making some tiny Christmas packages to go underneath it. Margaret's getting a new dollhouse this year from my sister after an altercation between Christopher and the Chipmunk House in which he came out the victor. I'm probably a wee bit more excited about setting it up and decorating it for Christmas tomorrow than a respectable adult should be, but what can you do? My peg painting did inspire David to create his own peg doll gift set involving several Ninjago characters as well as hand drawn and then wood-burned backdrops on some scrap wood we had from our attic renovations. Of course those painting sessions are what led to the toddler-in-the-white-acrylic-paint fiasco from my last post. I'm going to say it was worth it though, for him to be so excited to create a gift for his brother.
Also we're now practicing the art of putting away our art supplies when we are not using them.
Once the crafting was all done, we finished up the Christmas cookie baking with the pièce de résistance of our annual cookie baking endeavors--the rolled sugar cookies. Not my favorite of all Christmas cookies to eat, but the children's favorite by far--to make and to eat. Probably because they pile them a half inch thick with extra sugar. I mean decorations. I'm not even sure how John managed to eat the one he stuck full sized peppermints to, but he did. He's dedicated to his craft.
As usual I attempted to sneak in as many plain frosted stars as I could manage so that adults might actually want to ingest them. Because unlike the children, I'm boring.
Tomorrow we've got regular Christmas Eve things to do like decorating the tree and heading off to mass and wrapping all the presents that I probably should have already wrapped. We've also got some un-Christmas Eve-ish things to accomplish like finishing moving all of our displaced furniture into their final places now that the boys attic bedroom is finally finished and we can get all of the rooms put together the way we had planned them. Nothing like squeezing some ridiculously time consuming and stressful tasks into your last minute Christmas preparations. I really want the house settled before we bring all the new Christmas goodies into the mix on Tuesday so hopefully we can get it all done. That or I can pray for the grace to have a good attitude about leaving the house a partial mess even though it makes me feel more than a little bit crazy. Hopefully we can get most of it done and I'll only need to pray for a little bit of grace to get me through the extra Christmas mess pilled on top of furniture rearranging mess.
I like things tidy. It's a gift...and a curse.
Well, here's to the last day of Advent! May it be productive--but not frantic :)
Merry almost Christmas!
