I really need to get going with my Christmas shopping. I just finished decorating our Christmas tree yesterday, and now I am feeling more in the Christmas spirit. I didn’t get all of our decorations up this year as I didn’t feel like getting them all out. I figure I am doing good decorating the tree and keeping Isaac from tearing it down. He does really well with it, so far he just wants to touch the different textures of the tree and close-to-the-ground ornaments.

I am planning on doing a ton of baking this weekend. My mom and I will spend all day Saturday baking and decorating cookies. I plan on making Christmas sugar cookies, peanut butter balls, orange balls, fudge, and brittle cookies. Yum. I’ll also be making about 3 recipes worth of yeast rolls. Also yum! Jeff, Isaac, and I are going to Thousand Oaks to visit Jeff’s family and celebrate an early Christmas dinner, thus the rolls. I love this recipe of rolls, it was my Grandma’s. Every holiday (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter…) when we were kids she would bring the rolls. Now that she is gone, my mom usually makes the rolls for our family gatherings. Since it is Jeff’s family’s get together I will be bringing them. I hope to be as good at making them as my mom and Grandma. One other thing I’d like to be as good at is making pie crusts. I know practice makes perfect, but I just hate to fight the dough when rolling it out, getting it to the pie plate, and then if it is a pre-bake shell trying to not let it shrink down in the plate. It is my observation that all these things take decades to master, and since I don’t make that many pies it may take me a lifetime. By the time I get it right, I’ll be too old to be trusted with the pies. I’ll probably be trying to make a Kitty Kibble pie by then… ever see Christmas Vacation?

I am really looking forward to seeing Christmas through Isaac’s eyes. I expect this year to be very different from previous years. Although he is just one year old, you can see him processing what is going on. So much fun…

One last thing, yesterday when we were waiting to be seen by the pediatrician we were talking about the animals they had painted on the walls of the exam room. There were a couple zebras and a monkey. We used to talk about monkeys a lot, but not lately. I asked Isaac what a monkey said and then made the noises myself. He picked up on this right away, as if he’d been waiting for the chance to show me he remembered and knew what to say. He mimicked me and hasn’t stopped telling me since yesterday what a monkey says. Too cute.