Merry Christmas Eve!

Today was a great day with the family. Allyson and I stayed at home and got our bake on! We made a birthday cake for Jesus and homemade icing too! Then we mixed up batter for cake cookies. They are super easy to make {only 5 ingredients}, but oh so yummy! We may have got a little over our head with the cake cookies; I tripled the recipe!!! The intentions were to deliver to everyone on our street. By this time, Daddy and the other kiddos were back from running errands. It's funny because while they were gone, I told Ally "I keep feeling like Mae Mae is going to wake up!" Ally agreed. I'm so used to being home with all the kids by myself! 

Once the cookies were wrapped up, I started the next step on the cinnamon rolls I had going. It's a tradition for us to have cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. I always buy Grands or Pillsbury, but this year I decided to go all out and make them from scratch, because I have spare time to do this! And better do it now before 2016 weight watching begins! I used Pioneer Woman's recipe from a cookbook I got from Shawn and the kids in Branson, MO. {One day soon I'll blog about our trip we took there in October. It was a great time and I can see us visiting again.} I'm sure you can search for the recipe and find it online. Let me just tell you the process is lengthy: do this and wait until lukewarm, cover and let sit for an hour, put in the pan sit for 20 minutes before baking. A lot of hurry up and wait in the recipe for me. I wanted to just knock them out, but that wasn't the process. Patience. Anyhow, we ended up with 6 pans of cinnamon rolls, probably 60 of them, I'm not even kidding. A ton. We gave a pan to our neighbor and we'll probably freeze the rest. Super yummy. And I would bake again. I know it sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm just being real.

We cleaned up and got ready for our Christmas Eve Service at Church. So on Monday our church received a bomb threat if we had our service. Our pastor released a statement that we would continue to have our service and we would beef up security. He also said that we would not back down from evil. He quoted Romans 14:8 “For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” So true. We belong to Him and are here to glorify Him in all that we do. Whether we live or die, we are the Lord's. I'm happy to report that all went well with the service and we are safe in our beds at home. God is good.

We came home, ate dinner and then dropped off some goodies at our neighbors' houses. We got caught up on our Advent reading, as we had got behind a couple of days. It has been really good reading it this Christmas season.

The kids opened their first present from us. Pajamas!! Another tradition! The boys got Star Wars and the girls got matching Anna and Elsa pj's! Sisters! Super fun.

http://youtu.be/RbvzyYupTQ4

 

Love these kids to bit. We are excited about tomorrow.