In the kitchen.

In the spirit of creating beautiful childhood memories, baking Christmas cookies is definitely on the "to do" list.

We've made chocolate chip cookies a lot, and homemade pizza, and a variety of other things in the kitchen, but never tackled "Christmas cookies."

In fact, aside from baking with my mom when I was younger, I don't think I've single handedly made Christmas cookies even without Lilly.

So, time to learn. And by the way? Since we are temporarily in NYC and have only the items in our house that were gifted to us by my sister (which trust me, is a ton of stuff, but we don't have everything), we have no mixer. So, Miss Lilly has to improvise - we "mixed" with our hands! (Great occupational therapy, I'm thinking!)

Here is my girl with her fake "Glee" inspired smile: (The story behind the Glee smile is this: Lilly has a "cheese" smile that doesn't really show a good smile, plus she always looks away when she smiles that smile. But, she watches the show Glee regularly, and a few weeks ago "Rachel" was encouraging "Kurt" to smile during a performance and pointed to her mouth with a big smile, and then he did a huge smile while singing. Anyways, Lilly loves watching that and smiling the same way, so when I tell her to smile like "Glee" she does the below smile - still fake of course, but more genuine than that "cheese" business.)
And Mrs. Claus had an extra helper as my little elf was not that interested in rolling the dough:

Here are some of the cookies cut out:

And a certain little girl tasting the buttercream frosting as she was mixing:

Then we added red and green food coloring to the frosting. Lilly was in charge of "red" and it turned out more pink, but of course Lilly didn't want to add any additional red - pink is her favorite color.

Notice that there are way more green than red (pink) cookies: because Lilly was in charge of the "red" she ate most of her portion of the icing! That's my girl!

It was definitely a lot of fun baking with my girl. She is a great little helper, and we had a great night. She was on somewhat of a sugar high when it was time for bed, but she still managed to kneel next to me and say our nighttime prayers. I've wanted to get my girl into the habit of praying before bed - we usually say a little prayer, but I want her to be more involved. So last night she got on her knees beside me and I said our usual prayer "Dear God, thank You for mommy, daddy, and baby Lilly, thank you for Christmas cookies, and (can't remember what else I prayed for)" And then I said "Lilly, your turn" and she said "Dear God, thank You for mommy, daddy, and baby Lilly, thank you for Christmas cookies... " and when she finished she said a big "A-Men!" Love that girl!

And by the way: this week I discovered Trader Joe's. I've never lived near one, but they are great - so many cheap things, especially for New York City, where groceries are typically 3 times the price of "normal." Here is my favorite purchase the other day - a "guacamole kit." No strange powders, like a most grocery stores - just a box of a tomato, small onion, lime, jalapeno, two avacado's, and garlic - all for just $3 or so, plus the recipe. We ate it with our veggie flaxseed tortilla chips. A-ma-zing. Even if I have to ride the subway to ge there (I'm a total transportation snob), I will be back!