I apologize for the lack of posts this week my friends. I was so sure I could keep up the momentum of daily posting this month, but December has descended upon me with it’s full weight, wrapping my brain in a cocoon of constant thinking, planning, worrying. The holidays are hard on people, to be sure, and I’m no exception.

So, what have I been up to? Well, I had a fabulous afternoon on Wednesday, when Kaitlyn and I met up with Joy and her new baby at our local mall for beverages and baked goods at Panera, followed by a bit of shopping at Younkers and a brief stroll. Her son, who is just adorable, slept the whole time, and Kaitlyn was very well-behaved despite being confined to the stroller for most of the time. At the risk of sounding mushy, Joy is a pleasure to spend time with and I’m glad she’s my friend.

Wednesday evening was the school’s annual Holiday Choir Concert. I watched with pride as Nathan sang four songs with the rest of the second-graders, performing hand movements and little dances and obviously enjoying himself. When we met up with him afterwards, he was beaming. It isn’t often that all the attention is on him, and he deserves to be proud of himself. I didn’t see any signs at all of any kind of distractibility or any problems with paying attention, which makes me wonder why his teachers are so sure he has ADD. All I know is, he did a great job and has obviously been working very hard in music class.

Thursday evening was what the school calls “Winter Wonderland” night, which means that the PTO charges $2.50 per kid for a cup of hot chocolate and a decorate-your-own sugar cookie, plus they recruit High School Honor Society students to help the kids do crafts. There was bingo, Christmas pictures to color, and two Christmas ornament crafts. We go every year and they always have a good time. I am making friends with the mother of Nathan’s best friend, so it was nice to have someone to talk to while the boys ran around hopped up on sugar.

Tonight, I am trying to catch my breath before tomorrow, when Nathan has three friends coming over for a sort-of Birthday party. I don’t do fancy decorations or games or those “goody bags”, but they will have the run of the house for a few hours and I’m planning on letting them decorate cookies for a treat. It’s about all I can handle as far as parties go.

One last thing-Christmas cards. There are a few bloggers to whom I have promised a card, and I swear it’s coming, really. I bought cards today, and I am going to try to rustle up a photo to send with it. Every year I say I’ll do all the things I didn’t do the previous year, like take a family photo and mail the cards early, but it never seems to happen. Anyway, if you’re waiting for a card from me, it’s coming, I promise. Want to exchange cards? Email me your full name and address to elizabeth@table4five.net. Your information will be kept confidential.

SO. That’s been my last couple of days. How are all of you? I’m trying to work my way through Bloglines and catch up with everybody. I hope you are all well and staying sane. That’s what I’m trying to do.

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First, the giving: Last week I posted about Color for a Cause, the campaign to raise money for Doctors Without Borders. In case you missed it, all you have to do is click the link in my sidebar for TheFind.com, and then type in a search phrase that includes the word “red”. One dollar will be donated to DWB for every search. That’s it! It’s easy, it doesn’t cost you anything, and it is for such a good cause. Have you clicked and searched today?

Next, I would like to draw your attention to another charitable campaign, one that is being run entirely by bloggers. It is called Her Bad Auction,  and it is a series of raffles benefitting Muscular Dystrophy Research. A blogger that many of us know and love has a nephew, Tanner, with Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy. Click here to read a post about Tanner, but get a kleenex first. The story of how he wanted to design an airplane so he could fly to Toronto and meet his new baby cousin gets me every time.

You can help raise money for Muscular Dystrophy Research and possibly score some very cool last-minute Christmas gifts by purchasing raffle tickets for the Auction. The tickets are very reasonably priced at $1.00 and $5.00 each, and the auction prizes have all been donated by other bloggers.  On the Her Bad Auction website are instructions on how to buy the tickets and a list of all of the items that are available to bid on. Winners are chosen at random, but the more tickets you buy, the better your chances are of winning the item. There’s even an iPod Shuffle! Knowing that bloggers are working together like this makes me proud to be one myself.

Now, on to the receiving!  I picked up my Christmas present from Chris last night, because I just couldn’t wait another minute. It’s something I pre-ordered last JANUARY, and have been patiently waiting for ever since.

Yes, that’s right, it’s a video game. Which I won’t even be able to start playing for at least another day or two, but that’s okay. It will be there, waiting for me when I have, oh, forty or so hours to devote to it. Merry Christmas to me!

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During the other eleven months of the year, I pretty much stick to making one kind of cookie-chocolate chip. But in December, when the newsstands are full of holiday magazines with beautiful photos of cookie platters on the covers, I start thinking about other kinds of cookies to bake.

ClubMom blogger Jenn is hosting the First Annual Virtual Cookie Exchange. She wants to know what your favorite cookie recipe is for the holidays! If you’re looking for some new cookie ideas or the recipe for an old favorite, stop by her blog for the list of participants and their recipes.

Now, nothing is more fun than baking sugar cookies and letting kids loose with tubs of frosting, sprinkles and colored sugar. Their creations are messy and gloppy, but I think getting to make as much of a mess as you want and eating the results is the kind of Christmas memory kids should have. But when you need to take cookies to a party or want a nice tray to set out for family and guests, you need to make something that looks nice as well as being delicious. These are my two favorite cookie recipes, taken directly from my baking bible, the Betty Crocker Cookbook.

Christmas Snickerdoodles

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup margarine or butter, softened
1/2 cup shortening
2 eggs
2 3/4 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
****
1/4 cup sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon (mix these)

Directions:

Heat oven to 400. Mix 1 1/2 cup sugar, margarine, shortening and eggs. Stir in the rest of the dry ingredients except for the cinnamon sugar. Shape into 1 1/4 inch balls. Roll in cinnamon sugar**. Place 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 8-10 minutes or until set; cool on wire racks.

This recipe for Snickerdoodles serves/makes 4 dozen

**The way I make these Christmasy is by mixing some of the cinnamon and white sugar with red sugar in one bowl, and with green sugar in another bowl. Put a dozen cookies in a Ziploc bag, pour in one of the colored sugars and shake, then pour out onto the cookie sheet. Repeat, using both colors.

Russian tea cakes

1 cup margarine or butter, softened
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
3/4 cups finally chopped walnuts or pecans
1/4 teaspoon salt
Powdered sugar

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Cream together the margarine, 1/2 cup powdered sugar and vanilla. Stir in flour, nuts and salt until dough holds together. Shape into 1-inch balls, place 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 10-12 minutes or just until set but not brown. Roll in powdered sugar while still warm**, let cool. Roll in powdered sugar again.
Makes about 4 dozen

**I think it’s easier to put the cookies a dozen at a time in a big Ziploc bag, add some powdered sugar, shake well, then pour out onto a cooling rack. You’re going to get powdered sugar all over the place, so you might want to put newspaper or waxed paper under the cooling rack.

Now I really want to make these! I’ll post photos of the finished products when I do. Mmmm, cookies.

helpful information:What makes making cookies at christmas time more fun that doing it in a
christmas
costume! There are many different costumes
you can get at christmas time like a santa
suit or a elf
costume. Don’t forget the kids
costumes as too.

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I’d like to thank everyone who commented on When Will I Feel Like A Grownup?, it really does help to know I’m not alone. Do you ever see someone on TV or in a magazine, perhaps the CEO of some company or a famous fashion designer, and they have accomplished all these great things and they look fabulous, and then the story mentions that they are ten years younger than you? When that happens to me, I try to mentally rewind my life and imagine what I would have had to do differently to end up as a CEO or a Wall Street bond trader or a high-powered attorney. When we graduate from High School and go off to college, don’t we all pretty much start out even? We all take Freshman English and Intro to Economics and all those other courses I don’t even remember, but then by the time we graduate and head out into the world, how do we take such different paths?

Are some people just more motivated, more ambitious, more determined than others? If I had pushed harder to get an internship somewhere or taken a job at Hudson’s (now Macy’s) in their Management Training program, would I be one of those ladies I see having lunch together in their Ann Taylor suits and their sleek shiny hair? My college offered on-campus interviews, all we had to do was show up with a resume, but I had a hard time even deciding who to sign up to interview with. (Um, that was an awkward sentence, sorry). It might sound bad, but the truth was that I really didn’t want to have to work that hard. And therefore lies the difference between me and CEOs - I think those were the people who were willing to really throw themselves into their job for a few years, whereas I was definitely more interested in 9 to 5 with weekends and holidays off.

Suebob from Red Stapler has launched a new blog, True Employee Confessions. Need to get something off your chest about a coworker or your boss but don’t want to get Dooced? Send it in! Just because I’m a stay-at-home-Mom doesn’t mean I don’t have a boss, oh no. This is who I answer to these days:

Kaitlyn says I’d better figure out exactly what she wants exactly when she wants it or there will be even MORE whining, thankyouverymuch. 

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As a member of the BlogHer ad network, I am proud to announce that we have partnered with The Find.com and Doctors Without Borders for the Color For A Cause campaign. The ad is on my sidebar, and although normally the rules say not to blatantly point out ads, in this case we’ve been given permission to shout it from the rooftops.

TheFind.com is a shopping search engine that aims to find “every product for sale in every store online”. Which is pretty cool by itself, but get this. All you have to do is type in a search that contains the word “red”, and TheFind.com will donate $1.00 to Doctors Without Borders. You don’t have to buy anything, you just have to TYPE IN THE WORDS! How the heck easy is that??!?? Every time you stop by, you can click and type, and you’ll have donated another dollar.

What does Doctors Without Borders do with the contributions? You’d be surprised at how far they can stretch your dollar.

$35.00 provides two high-energy meals a day to TWO HUNDRED children

$50.00 vaccinates fifty people against meningitis, measles and polio

$70.00 buys two basic suture kits to repair minor shrapnel wounds

$100.00 supplies infection-fighting antibiotics to treat nearly forty wounded children 

I know everyone is on a tight budget. Christmas is in TWO WEEKS, my husband got paid yesterday and we will get ONE more paycheck until Nathan’s birthday and Christmas. I drop change into the Salvation Army kettles whenever I see one, and we will go to the mall this weekend and take a card off the Angel Tree to buy a gift for a child living at St. Vincent’s Home for Children. Taking literally ten seconds to click on a link and type some words in order to donate another dollar to such an important cause seems too good to be true, but it’s not. You could make a real difference to someone living in Darfur or another war-torn region of the world. I encourage you to visit the Doctors Without Borders website, click on the Field News tab at the top of the page, and then click on Recent Stories. It will break your heart but open your eyes too.

Thank you in advance, everyone, for taking the time to read this and hopefully clicking the link. Of all the things we as bloggers can do with this space we inhabit online, I can’t think of anything more important than helping to save lives.

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