Cookies!

Yesterday we baked gingerbread men. Well, first Ariel and I made the cookie dough. Then we put it in the fridge to chill until we got home with Trevor and Rachael to decorate the little cookie guys. But first... before we decorated cookie men, we did a little geocaching.

For my birthday Ray got me a Garmin handheld GPS unit. I know, a little geeky but I was so excited! I have been wanting to geocache with the kids for a while now. So today I loaded my first geocache onto the unit and, after I picked up Trevor from school, we tried our first geocache without Ray or our geocaching friends- Bill and Christianne. Rachael had Creative Kids, an afterschool "acting" program so we had until 2pm (45 minutes) until we picked her up. The cache was .6 miles away, so I figured we'd drive because I figured Ariel wouldn't be able to walk that far. So we found a spot near the cache in a townhome complex parking lot. The cache, we quickly discovered, was on the OTHER side of the golf course, requiring that we trek back up and around the course. Then it was not only on the other side, but all the way at the other end from where we were parked. Argh. So, hot on the trail, we made it all the way to the cache and were right on top of it. "What time is it?" I inquired to Trevor, who had the watch. "It's, um, close to 2pm," he replied. ACK! We not only were somewhere in some other townhome neighbourhood that looked like every neighbourhood around here, we were at the other end of the golf course and we hadn't found the cache. We spent five minutes frantically searching the undergrowth and couldn't find our treasure. So reluctantly, we had to abandon the search and turn for the trek back to the car. But, hm.. where was the car? I KNEW there was a shorter way back that we had walked. We had ten minutes and it would take us about 15 just to walk back the way we had come. I started to carry Ariel and set off on what I hoped was a shortcut. But it was 50 degrees, we were wearing coats and Ariel was HEAVY and kept sliding down my coat. "Ari, you have to RUN!" and I set her down and we jetted for the car. I have to hand it to my little 3.5 year old- she ran all the way back to the car. And I have to hand it to me- I did find the shortcut and we were back to the car in half the time it took us to get out to the cache. And, thankfully, Trevor's watch was a tiny bit fast. So I ended up only being one minute late to pick up Rachael. Needless to say, all the kids and I are going back to the cache today to find it. We were RIGHT there and there is nothing more frustrating than abandoning a search that you have ALMOST found.

Anyways, after that little adventure, we were ready to go home and roll, decorate and bake cookies!

Ariel, Rachael and Trevor decorating. We had M&Ms, Raisinettes, dried cranberries and coconut chips.


One batch of the finished cookies. Man, the recipe made like 40 gingerbread men!


I got The Best of Fine Cooking "Cookies" magazine. I handed it to Trevor to circle some cookies he wanted to bake this season. He handed it back to me and had circled like all the cookies. heh. Then, when I turned to the gingerbread men page, I found the little message on the lower right page: "I love this book!! Momy!" It was really cute.


Here's the video. Just the kids making cookies. Nothing amazing, but I think they are darn cute!