For one reason and another, I got messed up in my Christmas plans. I was going to have all of my baking done by the end of last week. I tried a new recipe for one type of cookies I was making and it totally didn't work. Unfortunately, I had made a double batch, so I had to throw away a lot of cookie dough. That put me behind schedule and our activities last weekend threw me off even more. I'm back on track now though, I think. I have one more batch of cookies chilling, waiting to be baked tomorrow, and the Cut Out cookies to frost and then I will have all my cookies ready to go into the mail. Then I have one more batch of Diamond Cookies to make for us and I think Alison and I are going to make Gingerbread Cookies just for her to decorate (since she's not going to get to help frost the Cut Outs). Then that will be it for the cookies this year.

I was also going to have all the presents that need to be mailed wrapped last weekend and that didn't happen, either. There was a mix up with the wrapping paper that Kevin's company prints. It was supposed to be ready last Friday, but because there had been a mix up with the deadline for the kids to get their pictures in, it wasn't ready until the middle of the week. And then, they didn't print as much as they did last year, so Kevin only got 15 sheet...5 sheets of the three different layouts. Which would have been fine, except that Alison actually colored some pictures this year, so we wanted to make sure that we used her paper for most of our presents. Unfortunately, despite everyone else having two pictures printed, she only got one of hers printed (and it wasn't the better of the two). We were kind of disappointed at that. Still, Kevin managed to trade 5 of the sheets that had somebody else's kids pictures on it for 5 more of Alison's. I think a lot of people were disappointed with how the paper turned out this year. Kevin's supervisor has two kids and they both put in two drawings and they got put on opposite sides of the same sheet of paper. Needless to say he was trying to trade to get more, too.

Anyway, my new target date for having all this stuff on it's way is Tuesday. Kevin has three days worth of use-it-or-lose-it vacation to take, so he's taking Tuesday off. That means he can take the packages to the post office for me and I won't have to try and manage them and Alison. I've done that before and it isn't pretty.

And here's my Christmas funny for the day. This afternoon, I wrapped most of the presents that we are going to be mailing out. As I finished them, I put them under the tree. When Alison got up from her nap, she came into the living room and saw the presents under the tree and said "WOW! Santa Claus came already?!?"