The week, the Drive, the Holidays

I’m work­ing on fin­ish­ing some stitched presents today, to be tak­en to my fam­i­ly of ori­gin tonight or tomor­row. I won’t be online, for the most part, as that does­n’t real­ly work so well with the stitching.

Yes­ter­day, shad­owkatt and I did all of the fam­i­ly Christ­mas shop­ping in about 4 hours, total. Most of that was for ingre­di­ents to go into bas­ket good­ies. All our gifts are home­made this year, oth­er than the Sculpey stuff sam­bear men­tioned yes­ter­day. That has been planned for a while. We won’t get to see some of the bas­ket recip­i­ents ’til next week, but I fig­ure they’ll be less over­whelmed by then. I hope so!

The home­made thing is actu­al­ly nice, in many ways. Next year, we’ll do more ahead of time. I’ve stitched for every­one in my fam­i­ly before, and they def­i­nite­ly appre­ci­at­ed the gifts. I had less time this year, so the gifts are small­er, but there’s still much love in them.

We’ll be fin­ish­ing the bak­ing and such today, too. We cer­tain­ly need to! One bread recipe is very def­i­nite­ly a keep­er. The sug­ar cook­ies came out very nice­ly, too. (I don’t like bak­ing with mix­es. I won’t do it if I can avoid it in any way.) I was going to make anoth­er sort of bread, but the first came out sweet­er than I expect­ed, so I may not do it at all.

Those who know me know that I haven’t cooked a lot in the last few years, much less done any real bak­ing! And I’m actu­al­ly enjoy­ing it. Per­haps I’m final­ly get­ting over some of the food issues I’ve had. Liv­ing in a very sup­port­ive envi­ron­ment where the les­son of “good enough” is repeat­ed to me fre­quent­ly def­i­nite­ly helps. Thank you, curiousmay9, sam­bear and shad­owkatt.

The girl will be with my par­ents and one set of sib­lings for Christ­mas Day. That’s almost become a tra­di­tion, as the actu­al Day isn’t as impor­tant to us as those for whom it is a reli­gious occa­sion. She’ll get some spoil­ing and spend time with fam­i­ly and they’ll be thrilled by her com­pa­ny. She might even man­age to get over to her father’s fam­i­ly, as they’re much clos­er to my par­ents (geo­graph­i­cal­ly) than we are.

sam­bear and I will be tak­ing a bas­ket to his fam­i­ly, as well. We haven’t gone to see them dur­ing the hol­i­days in sev­er­al years. His moth­er will be thrilled, I know. Who can tell about his father? I just hope he’ll be civil.

The hol­i­day cards WILL go out! I’m hop­ing to get more Relat­ed