"Sparkles"

Here are the two kid sweaters I knitted over Thanksgiving, when I was otherwise a (very pregnant) slug:

(Buddy isn't always thrilled with having his picture taken, particularly when he's muscling in on his sister's keyboard time.)

(Um, yeah, that's the potty chair.  We're on it a good percentage of the day, because we're just not reliable when asked whether or not we have to go, so we're going with the "prove it" method.)

We decorated sugar cookies yesterday.  It was the oddest sugar cookie recipie I've ever seen--the one from "America's Test Kitchen"-- and called for two sticks of butter and two tablespoons of cream cheese, and no eggs.  Very strange.  Tastes good, though.

Buddy did pretty well with decorating--lasted almost 5 minutes befrore starting to eat the decorations off the cookies.

Miss Boo loves anything with "sparkles" involved.  We had green and red sparkles; it was awesome.

Buddy's tree (I helped with the icing and the red dots...he shook out the sparkles).

She picked out her own outfit, by the way, backwards-facing-kerchief and all.  You may not believe me, but all the fashionistas will be wearing backwards kerchiefs next season.  You just wait.

"I think it needs green sparkles, Mama.  I need some more green sparkles."

They didn't eat the cookies whole--they just ate the top layer with frosting on it.  Which was sort of efficient, as you could then re-frost the semi-eaten cookie.

The cream cheese makes 'em yummy.

Mama, having no powdered sugar and being lazy, got the pre-mixed can of frosting.  Sue me, you're lucky I made cookies at all this year.  I could have bought the tin of shortbread and called it good.

These are the ones I decorated, because I didn't want ALL of them to be re-frosted...

Yesterday Miss Boo came into the kitchen, told me, "Mama, it's hard to explain..." and wandered out again.  I don't know what was hard to explain (there was no mess anywhere I could find), but thought that was very cute.

She is a normal kid, so don't mistake this next part--I'm hope I'm not just biased, but I might be--but thought I'd share that on Saturday she read a book for the first time.  It was the first book ("Mat") in the Bob Books, a very simple set of first readers.  We haven't been pushing her academically, but she loves letters and numbers and wants to know what sounds the letters make, and we've just been letting her go as fast as she wants.  So on Saturday she sat on my lap and sounded out, "M-at s-at" and so on through the book.

(Can you tell I'm trying to be offhand and not burst with pride?)

Cheers,

Breanna