11 Month Old - Christmas Cookies! :)

Referring to the title of this post - No, we didn't find 11 month old Christmas cookies... we have an 11 month old that HELPED make Christmas cookies! :) Ha! I am so clever! (Don't correct me; just let me keep thinking it!)

This week was a fun week starting with Monday on which the afore mentioned Christmas cookies were made. Maddie and I had lots of fun baking. We made cut-outs and Melting Moments. The Melting Moments were very special as the recipe comes from Maddie's Great-Great Grandmother, Mary Gruetzman. Melting Moments have always been my favorite cookie and it's neat that I can bake them with Maddie. Mads helped with every step of the process, including:
Stirring:

Rolling & Baking:

Frosting with the required pink frosting:

and of course TASTING! :)

She even helped with the cleaning afterwards! What a good kidlet, I've apparently taught her well!!


After cookie baking we took a break to go to Ripon to have lunch with Dad and the ladies at work. We had a small Christmas celebration which included us giving Andrew's Optician's granddaughter a present and them giving one to Mads. It was Maddie's first time with wrapping paper and I think she's gotten the idea. She might just be ready for Christmas after all! :)

Wednesday night Andrew and I had a date night while Grandma Mary watched Mads. We started with dinner at Nakashima of Japan, which I absolutely love but haven't had since the night before I went into labor with Mads, and then went to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert at the Resch Center. The concert was AWESOME! We haven't seen TSO since I lived in Madison and it was so great! They even played my favorite song twice! :) :)
Maddie had a good time with Grandma Mary. I heard reports that they might have made some cookies, but I have no visual proof of that! ;)

Friday was Miss Madeline's ELEVEN month birthday! That's right. In only one short month she will be ONE! It is so sad how fast time goes by! We tried to take Maddie's monthly pictures and again it was hard to get any decent ones. Apparently she is TOO busy to stop for pictures!
Here are the best ones:




While it looks like the 12 month outfit might almost be fitting, it really isn't. The shirt is still quite huge on her and the pants are way too long and so big they might even classify as "parachute pants." One of the gifts that Maddie got on Monday was a 6-9 outfit and those pants are almost falling off. Thank heaven for diapers! Without a diaper the pants would for sure be on the ground!

I think most of her problem is that she has become so mobile that she's just burning off the tiny tush that she did have and it is now an almost non-existent tush! Speaking of mobile, Maddie's preferred method of transportation is now simply walking. If she's sitting on the ground and sees something that she wants she won't crawl. That's for babies. She will bend over, but her hands on the ground, shimmy her feet underneath and do a bear walk to stand herself up. Then she will go walk to whatever it is she wanted. She's getting pretty speedy too. You can see her in one spot, look away for a second, look back and she's gone. Luckily she hasn't found anything that she shouldn't be into yet!

On Saturday while I was at work Mads and Dad went to Appleton to have lunch with Grandma Mary, Aunt Jill, Claire and Nick. Look at these cute cousins!

That evening when I was done with work we went over to have dinner with the Ames Family. It was nice to spend time with them as they've been busy with Caden (who is already seven weeks old if you can believe that) and out-of-town visitors.

Sunday I also worked, but was able to bust out a little early. I headed home to help Andrew start getting dinner ready as we had some new friends come over for dinner. Erin and Dave came over with their 6 month old daughter and we had a nice time. It's so hard to meet new friends when you're "old!" I wish for the days when you could meet someone new and ask them "Want to be my friend?" and you were good to go! We had a very nice time getting to know Erin, Dave and Miss Alice. Lily gave them the stamp of approval as she rolled over for a belly rub from Dave within 10 minutes of their arrival!!
After dinner we played a little bit of Wii, Maddie even tried to get in on it:


So that's our week in a nutshell. This week we are looking forward to heading to Monroe this weekend for Christmas with my family there. I can't wait. It's going to be fun and Maddie is going to have a blast!!

Hope everyone has a good week. Here are a few more pictures:

Trying to look out the window to see the...... LOWES truck!!!

Playing with the gumball machine, but the balls wouldn't go down...

Oh, that's why!!

Playing with the door stopper. I'll admit that I loved those as a kid too!


Thanks for stopping by! STAY WARM!