Christmastime!

And just like that, I finish one post about Thanksgiving and move right into the next about Christmas. 

The girls helped get a few ornaments on the tree and then I immediately decided we needed to take a few Christmas pictures.  These goobers.  I don't even know.  One year, I will either a) wait for Jesse to be home to help keep attention at the camera, b) I won't care or c) the girls will be old enough to actually listen and obey all at once and not taking turns or not at all. 

Until then, we have fun.

This past weekend, Team Hildebrand took off for the Cincinnati area to meet up with the rest of my side of the family for a pre-Christmas weekend at Great Wolf Lodge.  My folks had the great idea for us all (Mom and Dad, Mama, Jess and family, Joel and Kimmy and my family) to get together before Christmas and have a weekend together where we could just spend time as a family and exchange gifts at that point.  Meeting at Great Wolf Lodge was a really fun place, especially for Lily and Emma.  Naturally, I only took a few terrible pictures on my cell phone and none on my actual camera, so that's annoying.  We had a great time, and it went too quickly, but my troops had a fun!

happy baby loves water

play hard, crash hard

watching a show

story: the girls and I had never had Dippin' Dots, and when the girls asked for ice cream, Jesse went to the Lodge's ice cream store and bought us all Dippin' Dots. I ate a huge bite of mine and asked what in the world was wrong with these things. Jesse looked at me funny and said they were fine and to stop being picky.  So I kept eating it and kept asking why these things were so weird and doing strange things in my mouth and head, similar to pop rocks, which I hate (and also had never had before this year).  After watching me eat them for a few minutes, Jesse asked, "what in the world is wrong with your mouth?  Why are your Dots doing that?"  And then a lightbulb went on and he said, "OOOooooooh, I got you 'Poppin' Cherry.'  I guess that was the pop rock flavor..."  upon telling the story, it isn't as funny if you weren't there, I'm sure, but it was hilarious to us at the time and I want to remember how funny we are, so it needed to be told.

Yesterday at the grocery store, I found little kid sized oven mitts that came with packets of sugar cookie mix and a cookie cutter.  I make fantastic sugar cookies, but I loved the mitts for the girls, so I bought two.  Since it was a mix and I only had to add in a few ingredients, I let the girls do 90% of the work, only helping to guide them and with the oven: they added the ingredients, turned the mixer on, floured the table, rolled and cut the cookies out, and with an extremely nervous Momma, checked on them in the oven and took them out when they were done.  It was a fun activity, and the cookies even turned out decently, though the dough was kind of over worked and the cookies were a variety of thicknesses.

right in the middle of the action, ready to help out also.