
and if you're a really mean mom like i am...

you'll give them a box of baby wipes and make them clean it up themselves ;D
gingerbread muffins with whipped cream and christmas pears for breakfast on christmas eve. yummy!
every year my dad makes crepes for dinner on christmas eve. i'm not sure why we started doing this (it started when i was really little), but i'm glad we do it, they're delicious!
christmas eve cookies, christmas morning stockings, and henry's tush ;D
just a snippet from christmas morning. the girls had so much fun opening their presents and playing with their toys. i can't wait for next year!
she was so excited to start cooking!
she decided that she wanted to make a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. i measured the water for her and she got to dump everything in the bowl and mix it all up. (i helped mix a little, that stuff was pretty thick!)
here it is going into the oven and coming back out after the recommended 12 minutes, plus an extra 5 (i find that 100 watt bulbs aren't very efficient at cooking cake...). after it cooled, abbey loaded that sucker down with as much just-add-H2O "frosting" as she could. she was SO proud of herself! it tasted exactly like i expected it to taste, abbey thought it was the most delicious cake anyone every made. she's probably right ;D

ellie dressed up like a little angel, so sweet, she was adorable! i tried to get abbey to wear an angel costume, too, but she was dead set on being the camel!
this is the little manger they had set up. i was pretty impressed with the decorating going on in here. you can't tell from the pictures, but they went all out. all the walls were covered with fabric painted like stone walls or night scenes from a village and the ceiling was covered with dark blue fabric with stars painted on it and twinkle lights stuck underneath it so the sky glowed. it was really, very cool.
the girls playing in joseph's workshop, which was a little wood working and craft area. there were blocks to build with, a table to make ornaments out of popsicle sticks and buttons, and a cute old grandpa sat in the corner and did wood carvings.
since we never know how long henry will sleep, i thought we'd make cake mix cookies. there's only three ingredients so they go together fast. and you don't really have to measure anything, so there's only a bowl and a spoon to wash. perfect.
i pre-broke the eegs and beat them in a disposable cup so that abbey would be able to dump all the ingredients in without any help. she mixed a lot on her own, but i helped her a little toward the end (the crisco makes the dough pretty stiff).
she loved rolling the dough into balls, she said it was like chocolate play dough. she got extra excited when she found out we were rolling her balls in powdered sugar. abbey's a big fan of sugar.
being the mean mom that i am, i made her help me clean up the kitchen while the cookies baked. i told her it was part of the fun of baking, and since she's only 4, she believed me. abbey washed off the counter while i washed the dishes.