Busy weekend

Another busy weekend. Seems like all my weekends are like that anymore. Thursday night Jen and I went over to Menards to see about getting a Christmas Tree. Yeah every year we talk about going out the day after to get one, but either never do or they are sold out, so we decided to just go and buy one. Menard's had a sale on all trees and of course the tree that Jen saw and liked a few weeks ago was sold out (even the floor model). She had them call around and found out that the South store had 16 of them, so she headed on over Friday after work and picked one up. Friday night we got an appointment to get the boys pictures taken for the Christmas card/Andrew's 3rd. We decided to just do the boys this year since who want to see Jen and I. We showed up and it was really crowded in the photo area. Everything was going pretty good. The boys were pretty happy, they were keeping pretty much on time to schedule and then it happened.... I was playing with Andrew and chasing him around the basement of Penny's. I see Jen down the hall signal me that it was time for the photos. While we were heading back Andrew sees a couple of kids in those kids cars/carts and wanted to play in them. Whoever invented those cars and who ever put them at EVERY freaking entrance to the Mall should burn in hell (or at least get a bad case of hemorrhoids). There is nothing like trying to go to the mall and encountering a kid meltdown every freaking time because you won't spend the $5 to rent these plastic aggravators. (yet another reason I rarely go to the mall) You see we took the boys to the play area of Menards Thursday night and they played with some riding toys in the play area, but I couldn't explain to a 2 year old they they aren't for everyone to play with. So Andrew is in meltdown mode as we step into the photo studio and won't do anything we want him to do. Lucky for us the photographers at Penny's are real pros and she was able to entertain him enough to get him to stop crying. (That and the fruit snacks helped). We were able to get a couple of keepers from the 20 or so photos that she took. Friday night I went home and started assembling the Christmas tree while Jen stopped and grabbed a pizza on the way home. Amazingly the tree assembly went pretty smooth even with my two "helpers". I need to actually read the instructions before starting those projects since I started building the tree from the top down and they suggest building it from the bottom to the top... that would have been MUCH easier. The funny part is there was as much needles on the ground as if we would have had a real tree. I am hoping that eventually it will stop dropping all it's needles and that those were just some loose ones. Jen finally gets home from getting pizza with a story. She ordered this new double crust pizza half meat and half veggie. Of course it came out all meat (were the Kramers in the restaurant?). So rather than wait for another 25 minutes (pizza hut on a Friday night) she just took the pizza and a coupon for a free one. Overall I have to say I wasn't real impressed by this pizza. First of all it was only a medium (for $12?) and there wasn't anything real special about it. Just like a pan pizza. But you never know unless you try. I still like the stuffed crust from the Hut and the regular pizza. I assembled the Tree and passed along the responsibility to Jen for decoration. I had to place it in three different spots in the living room before finally finding a good place. Dang that tree is freaking heavy. I had to take it apart in sections to move it.

Saturday and Sunday were a Disney movie marathon at the house. William got into the DVD cabinet and was pulling out all sort of movies that aren't in the regular rotation. The one he saw and stuck with for most of the weekend was Cinderella II. I am telling myself that he is watching it because Cinderella is HOT and nothing else. Lucky I at least the the picture-in-picture to watch football or whatever (I wish I had split screen). Saturday night Jen and I talked about going to see a movie. She wanted to see "Enchanted". It looked slightly amusing so I decided it would be worth seeing, especially if we went to the Cinema Grill and I can get a beer. So we were trying to get someone to watch kids and weren't having much luck. Finally Jen got ahold of Tracy and as I was overhearing the conversation I hear Tracy say that she wanted to see the movie too, so I suggested that she should go with Tracy instead of me. I know Jen could use the break from the kids and her and Tracy hardly ever get together, so I thought that would be better. That and we weren't going to Cinema Grill so no beer :) ... Jen said that they might bring Tracy's boys back to the house after the movie and play with our boys a little bit. So I decided to make some cookies for the boys to snack on. I look in the cabinet, no chocolate chips, darn, I look in the fridge and only half a stick of butter so no snickerdoodles which are my usuals. I decided to get creative and bring down the laptop and hop on the Internet to look for a recipe. I look for a sugar cookie recipe that requires only half a stick of butter. I actually find one, and after much internal debate decided to go for it. I have been burned by an Internet recipe before so I was a little leery. I start putting the cookies together and of course the boys have now confiscated the laptop to play games, but I have the recipe on another page for reference. I put all of the ingredients together (getting egg yolks without the white is hard) and it looks like this big gooey liquid mess that looks like quicksand. Son of a B****. Jen then shows up and says that Tracy's boys were acting up in the car so they weren't coming over. Great. I look over the recipe again and I have all the proper measurements and ingredients, so I decide to throw it onto a sheet and throw it into the oven to see what happens. They ended up being the best, soft sugar cookies that I have had in a long time. And it made a ton of them. So I have added that recipe to the arsenal (I will post later). I ended up putting the lights on the tree. Of course there weren't enough lights so I had to find another strand and restring it. The tree is still waiting for ornaments and tinsel. We decide that it would be easier to do it after the boys are in bed, but after the boys are in bed usually Jen is asleep on the couch, so I am hoping that it might be decorated by the end of the week. Either that or let the boys help us and just keep an eye on them so they don't break anything.......