Baking and Games

Today, Ethan and Lydia came down and spent the day. It's been a while since I truly broke out my "inner asian tourist" and went nuts with the camera (click on the thumbnails below for a bigger image). So we planned a ton of fun stuff to do. First, Donna and Lydia made a bunch of Christmas cookies! From our ever-growing cookie cutter collection, Lydia selected fish, angels, and other shapes. The sweet smell of sugar quickly filled the house.

Here's Lydia carefully cutting and shaping the cookies. We had shredded coconut, M&Ms, peanut M&Ms, little dark chocolate chips, and a lot of icing. Before lunch, we had enough time to cut the shapes and get some cookies onto the cooling racks.

Pizza for lunch! Laying on pepperoni; checking the final product. We made two gourmet pizzas and loaded on the toppings. Hoo-boy! Pizza and cookies are the foundation of any good day.

Sugar high with Mr. Peanut; Ethan and Mom jammin Gran Turismo. We setup the Momo force-feedback wheels and went a little nuts! The best racing was actually with multi-colored Austin Mini's on the Alpine Mountain course in GT3. They were like riding bikes after driving race-prepped C5-R Corvettes around the Speedway. Much time was spent going the wrong way and driving into each other.

After the Patriots game got started (and the traffic around Gillette cleared), Ethan and I went to the batting cages in Wrentham and did some hitting. Aunt Peggy -- he insisted on wearing his Seattle Mariners hat. I'm not sure I about that! But when we got home, we watched the Pats finish off the Bucs. Wow. The Patriots are looking good down the stretch!