Zoo Heaven

A got her birthday gift from my dad today. It was a Playmobil zoo, the BIG one. She had been asking me to give her hints each day that it did not arrive in the mail. Last night, she guessed correctly, but I was not going to give it away. So when the box came today, she was guessing as we opened it. I pulled it out and she was so excited she had been right. She said, "I have to send Poppe a thank you for this!!!" As if, finally, a gift worth thanking someone for. ;-b It took an hour to put it together, but it was played with very intently until just a little while ago.

I baked the sugar cookies I had made the dough for last night and the girls and I sat down to decorate them. E made about three in a row and ate each one as it was done. Then she declared herself done and went off to play. I learned my lesson about not letting them eat the cookies the other day with the candycane cookies. So, I said they could eat these, and of course they did not eat nearly as many as I predicted. A was a bit more helpful with decorating them for the goodies to be given as gifts. She did quite a few, assembly-line style, with me. Then she too went off to play. I swear they stayed and finished decorating the whole batch two years ago. Oh well.

I tried out my new chocolate thermometer making chocolate dipped pretzels tonight. When I followed the rules of tempering to the degree, it worked perfectly. When I fudged it because it was late and E wanted to go to bed, it did not work so well. I got half a batch of shiny hard chocolate and half a batch of not so shiny and hard, but not yet streaked white, chocolate. Oh well, they taste the same! My family will just have to forgive my lack of skill with tempering chocolate.

Gotta go wrap the gifts for family, so we can pack up the boxes and get them off to the post office in the next day or two.