Sugar Shop

Planning to be unplanned....it takes a lot of work.

I hope everyone is enjoying Christmas. I didn't plan on taking a blog break but this time of year gets pretty crazy with so much going on. This year I have decided to take the season easy. I have decided that it's ok to decline invitations and not get over planned. It's ok to not make every thing I wanted to make. And it's been great. We've had lots of family movies by the fire, unplanned visits with friends and there is always the December birthdays in my family. ( I think there should be some kind of rule about sex in March. Lol. too many December babies) and there has been plenty of making stuff which I'll eventually post about.

With that being said there is one annual event that is a must! Mine and Tara's annual shopping day.

Here are the rules:
1. Neither of us are allowed to make any other plans for the entire day or night.
2. We are gone day and night ..breakfast,shopping, coffee,shopping, Lunch,shopping, a drink,shopping, Dinner,shopping, Drinks, dessert.
3. The husbands are to take care of the kids and not call us unless it's an emergency Lol.
4. No dieting allowed.

We seem to run into some confusion from family and friends each year. They just don't get it. It usually goes something like this: One of us is invited to do something or other that night, we decline..sorry we have plans.Oh what are you doing? It's Dena and Tara's shopping day. Oh your just shopping...well can't you just.....Nope it's our shopping day. Well,what time will you be done?....Sorry don't know....Since you're just out shopping can't you.....Nope. Not gonna do it. Good lord it's all we can do not to have our day derailed. When the day finally arrives and we are in the car securely on our way to breakfast I feel like we have pulled off a secret government mission just to carve out one full day of unplanned time.

9 am - Railroad Cafe for breakfast
10 am - Panama Bay for Coffee and Making our lists and plotting our route
11 am - Toys R Us the first stop, you can see the car is empty. We always put baskets to keep our stuff seperate...I forgot to take a picture at the end of the day when the car is full.
11:30 - the mall

12:00 Godiva tuffles....oh my lord. Tara literally grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the store and said we are getting a treat. That's what our day is about after all. Now, I'm not a big chocolate person or I should say I wasn't a big choc person but Godiva truffles are some serious stuff.

Above is Tara pointing out to me all the different little balls of crack...I mean chocolate. We got gingerbread truffles and eggnog truffles and espresso truffles.....

hmmmm which one is this. Tara how come every time you took my pic I was eating or drinking. Lol.

Speaking of crack...as we were leaving the mall through Macy's we encountered more crack. Warning don't look if you're eating. Is it wrong that we actually turned around and Tara pretended to be holding something interesting while I snapped a photograph so we could document our exposure to crack?

who knows what happened in our wake. As soon as the camera fired we turned and practically ran laughing all the way...ho ho ho. I never claimed to be totally mature did I?

After the mall we headed to Cost Plus Imports for stocking stuffers then to the Barnes and Noble shopping center where we had appetizers and a beer with lime and made our round to the shops there. Then to the craft store for art supply gifts and then to Target and then we called Simply Fondue to make dinner reservations. They could only get us in at 9:30 pm which was perfect because it was 8 pm and we still had to go to Walmart.

This is my face when I saw our dessert.

If you have a Simply Fondue near you...at the very least go there for dessert. Do you see this??? More crack I tell ya. This was a Kahlua Heath Bar Chocolate fondue and do you see this plate of treats for dipping? There were bits of rice krispy treats, marshmallows, bananas, strawberries, fudge and an entire slice of cheesecake.

Try to plan one of these days next year, seriously, it's productive (we get 90% of our shopping done) and it's a day to treat our selves. So call a best girlfriend or your mom or sister and tell them you need to start a new tradition! Merry Christmas!

Lego Love

Just a quick pop in to show some Lego Love. We bought this Lego Advent Calendar at the lego store at Disney world and every morning the little guy (5 yrs old) flys out of bed to open the new day. Each day so far has been a little package of something that must be put together. We placed one of those green lego boards in front so that we can attach all the pieces as the come out. So if your like me and ran out of time to make a cool homemade this is a great option. Even if you don't have one, get one now and I bet your little one would have fun "catching up" by opening the December days that have already past (5 already can you believe it?). They also have a Girly version! That's it! That's the post. I am working on a new bag though. That'll be next! Hope you all are taking time to enjoy Christmas. My little man has pronounced that December is Christmas. Not December 25th. Who am I to argue? I'm down! I'm in! Every day he wakes up...it's still Christmas mom? Sure baby. For 20 more days. So Merry Christmas!

Curious George Gets a "Cuddles"

Such a cute idea. In my sons kindergarten class a Curious George backpack travels home for a few days with each student and they are to write down their adventure with George in a bound book that stays in the back pack. Well the little guy asked if I would make George a blanket since he didn't have one. (I have made blankets for his transformers and dinosaurs so this was sad to him that George didn't have a cuddles. This is what little guy started calling blankets when he first started talking. I went to my scrap basket and I had small scraps of the sock monkey fabric...perfect for a monkey! So off this little cuddles goes with George back to school.

Steve broke our coffee pot Saturday, we dropped everything and headed to the store. Heaven forbid we wake up on Sunday unable to make coffee! We got this one. Love it!

With the thermal carafe the coffee stays warm for hours with out cooking it to death. We made a pot when we brought it home at 4:30 in the afternoon and that night it was still hot enough to drink at 10:30 pm. (not that I drank it that late...I was tempted though. Did I mention I love coffee?