Time flies when you're....

Now how should I finish that title?  Having fun, going crazy trying to get the house clean, discovering that celebrating Advent to the fullest is an exhausting job, baking cookies, cleaning toilets, trying to find just five minutes to relax after all the chores of the day are finished (Ha! That will never happen, will it?).  If you haven't already guessed, life is a bit crazy, stressed, hectic and so on.

I have much that I want to blog about, but life is going ahead full steam at the moment and most days I feel as if there's little time for me to do anything other than catch my breath.

In the past three weeks we have done so many things that I want to document here on the blog, because this is how I preserve the memories I will want to look back on someday.  We've made graham cracker gingerbread houses which I have yet to take pictures of, unless we count the one I took of the one I made.  Little fingers have been touching the houses for over two weeks now and the intoxicatingly delicious smelling buttercream icing is not strong enough to withstand hungry children assaulting it.

We celebrated St. Nicholas' day with candy treats in bedroom slippers.  Ellie was incredibly excited despite the fact that she didn't exactly like the candy she got. Sigh.  She knew why the candy was in her slippers instantly while Madeline stood there trying to figure it out.  We watched CCC of America's The Boy Who Became St. Nicholas on EWTN and the girls began a Santa vs. St. Nicholas debate that got a little ugly.  Madeline understands that they are pretty much one in the same while Ellie is certain that they are two separate entities with totally different origins.  I'm trying to stay silent on the issue for the most part.  I do make comments that our Santa tradition comes from St. Nicholas and I casually mention when he lived.

Madeline was altar server for the first time on the eve of the feast of the Immaculate Conception.  I did blog about that in last week's small successes, but it deserved it's own post, if you ask me.

On Saturday we made salt dough ornaments as Christmas gifts.  I messed up the recipe and then needed to run to the grocery store for extra salt.  The girls had a good time pressing the cookie cutters into the dough.  We finally got to paint the ornaments yesterday.

I insanely decided to make a sweet bread that I found a recipe for on Karen Edmisten's blog for St. Lucia day and spent the better part of a day making a bread that we didn't like all that much.  I'm going to assume that I screwed it up some how since everyone else who has made this braided bread raves about it.  Sadly, it just wasn't sweet enough for us.  Fortunately, I made the bread on the 12th, so I had time to recover and make something that we'd all like so that Madeline could deliver cinnamon rolls to me and Ellie in bed yesterday.  Bryan even heated the rolls up before he went to work.  Let me just say that I was surprised that he sat down and celebrated St. Lucia day the evening before with the bread we didn't like and then again in the morning.

I spent most of yesterday baking cookies.  I found myself wondering why I'm always running out of ingredients.  It seems like I can't bake anything without having to make an unscheduled trip to the grocery store.  I have to say that I'm getting rather frustrated with myself about this situation.

Today I focused on stuff like cleaning the bathrooms, folding laundry, and running to the same stores twice.  I simply can't keep my head straight when I feel like I'm spinning in a thousand directions.  It was in the 20s here today so I was very upset that I had to run to the craft store and Target twice each.  That's four extra exposures to 26 degree weather that I didn't need.

I'm hoping I'll be able to post some pictures of what we've been up to soon.  I also need to remember to take pictures of the girls in front of the Christmas trees.  Never in all my life has Advent felt like it was flying by in the blink of an eye.  It's so hard to believe that we're less than two weeks away from Christmas.