All Day Cookie Making

Rolling out the dough and getting covered in flour!

So proud of her cookies!

Cutting out a bell- one of her favorites.

Letting dad help.

More bells.

Using her own little rolling pin.

Eli (and his wild bed head) just sort of zoning out while we finish cookies!

This is about as interested as he got in the cookie dough!

A few hours and change of clothes later we were finally decorating the cookies! This one was for my mom who is obsessed with red hots!:)

Below: Eli was happy for a bit just shaking the sprinkle containers. We didn't dare let him actually get his hands in any- maybe next year!

A few days before Christmas we spent the entire day making Christmas cut out cookies. I'm quite serious in that it took us the whole day!:) Lily and I made the dough after breakfast. While I showered and she played (and Eli slept) the dough chilled. Then Lily and I (and Joe for a bit) spent quite some time rolling and cutting out the dough. Lily, as you can see, got really into it! She's does pretty good rolling out the dough and actually does quite well at using the cookie cutters. There were a number of cookies that she did all on her own that turned out great! She really liked to roll the dough, cut out one cookie right in the middle, and start over! Maybe that's part of the reason it took us all day!:) With a little dough left Eli finally woke up from his very long morning nap. We put him in his booster seat and I thought he would be thrilled to play with (and eat) a little lump of dough. After all this is the boy that will put anything and everything in his mouth! But I think maybe he was just still too out of it from his marathon nap to do much other than just sort of stare at us and every few minutes give his dough a little poke with his finger. That was it- he never played with it or ate any of it!

After cutting out and baking all of the cookies came lunch and nap time (I think Eli skipped his nap though since he took such a long morning one- a bad habit we are getting into). During nap time I got everything ready for decorating and when Lily woke up we all went to town decorating our many Christmas cookies! My mom had this rule growing up that I could only use 2 kinds of sprinkles/decoration on each cookie (so I wouldn't go too overboard). While that's probably a pretty reasonable rule in our house we just let Lily go for it and be as creative (and often heavy handed with the sprinkles) as she wants! Cookie decorating is always an adventure! After decorating it was pretty much time for dinner and then maybe a bit of play and bedtime. So, yes, it pretty much took us all day long to make our Christmas cookies. What a sweet day!