the.amanda.sewell

Last night I took my little ballerina E to see the Nutcracker for the first time.   First we parked, and on the elevator down to street level, we met one of the dancers who played an angel and a soldier.  That was cool.  Then we went out to eat at Steve's Grill about a block from the Symphony Hall. It was actually really yummy and they had the skinniest fries I have ever seen.  It was cozy and relaxing.  It was raining a bit while we were in the restaurant, but when we left it was just barely misty. YAY! In the symphony hall, we got our picture taken with a Sugar Plum fairy -- I asked E if she wanted it to be just her, but she insisted I be in the picture as well. Then the show began.  We had great seats - row 11.  It was magical.  E sat the first half on my lap because she was leaning back and forth a lot and I wanted to make sure she could see.  Then at intermission we got her a booster so she could use her own seat.  The show went ...

Hehe!  We made a gingerbread house   er . . . nice pile of gingerbread decorated with candy.  It was a lot of fun, well, except for the roof sliding off just moments after we took some pictures.  In the end, it dried okay, and I learned some lessons - 1 ) use enough icing, but not too much   2 ) prepare the house base and let dry before letting kids know it is time to decorate the gingerbread house   3 ) icicles really MAKE the house, leave them off and it looks bad   4 ) stick to gingerbread men, they are so much easier with little kids! That said, here are some cell phone pictures (sorry for the bad quality but my camera was MIA in my disaster house - please ignore the messy counter in the background): Decorating . . .    Smiles with the FINISHED HOUSE:

(Singing Happy Birthday to E) E turned 2 today!  Michael had to go to some political thing, so we spent the morning in town and got balloons for him and did some shopping at Kohls!  I love that store!  I got a cute new dress (red) for Christmas, and some cute trouser jeans, ties for the boys and one to match for hubby.  It was a great morning.  When we got home we set up for E's family birthday party.  My SIL Laura came over with her hubby and cute kids.   Laura and I went shopping for stuff for taco salad and went to a holiday boutique and then we all just hung out at my house.  We even managed to get in a game of "Settlers of Catan" in before they left which was fun as we had not even opened our game boxes since we moved here two years+ ago.  Sadly I was not the winner though. I am so glad they came!  It made it so much more like a birthday than just a special day where we ate brownies (yup, little man doesn't like cake so much). ...