Christmas Eve Day

We spent the day before Christmas eagerly anticipating Christmas and preparing for the big day. Since it was a holiday, R stayed home and we were able to hang and do fun stuff like play games, read, eat (my personal favorite), and hang by the fire. What a life.

At some point, however, the kids get a little stir crazy. While I love sitting around doing nothing or reading a good book, this is not as appealing at the ripe age of 7 years. Plus, R needed to do some final Christmas wrapping, so I thought it would be a good time go skiing or skating. I was leaning to skiing, but the kids opted for skating, so it was off to Union Arena.

There was a decent crowd there, and we had fun. A&N are great skaters, especially N, and I still think he'd made a great hockey player. They have hockey camps in January, and that might be something we'll investigate because he's said he's interested.

We got home around 4:00, and this made the dinner schedule a little harder because the plan was to broil salmon and asparagus, but also served our newest incarnation of bread, as well. The bread, as anyone who bakes knows, is a complete hassle, with huge amounts of time dedicated to letting it rise. Too much, if you ask me.

I was planning on making low glycemic cookies and chocolate pudding cake first. As you can see, I have my priorities straight by making dessert first. Then I was going to bake the bread that had been rising all day, then broil the fish and veggies. The problem was, by the time dessert was done, everyone was getting hungry and when R broke out the box of crackers, I knew had to get dinner on the table ASAP.

I ditched the idea of finishing the bread by supper, cooked the meal, thereby letting the bread rise for longer than usual, but I've not found this to be a problem, even when it goes over for hours. As soon as dinner was ready, I put the loaves in and let them bake while we ate.

The meal was nice, we even had sparkling pear cider to go with the fish. I made sure it was non-alcoholic this time. Then we had chocolate pudding cake and vanilla ice cream, which went over well with the kids. The adults weren't complaining, either, and best of all, it was all low-glycemic.

After supper, we watched a fairly boring movie, but it was fun trying to fit all four of us onto the futon and then see who could sit still for the entire movie. I think R was the only one.

Until the next time, thanks for reading.