Sugar Cookies and Sibling Gifts

Today we decided to make rolled sugar cookies. We used the recipe from this cookbook. (Mom used to mail me boxes of these cookies when I was in college--yum. She always kept OBU box #4001 full of good mail!)

We have two big Zip-loc bags of cookie cutters. I had Alexee get them out of the cabinet and start sorting through them to find the Christmas cutters. Her definition of a "Christmas" cookie was much broader than mine and Rhett's--ha! She included a tulip, a cat and a heart. This really stressed Rhett out. He tried and tried to convince her to put those away, but she wouldn't. He said, "How on earth do you consider a cat a Christmas cookie cutter?" She justified it by saying that someone could receive a cat as a Christmas gift. :) (I'm sure she wishes that someone would be her!) She turned the tulip upside-down to turn it into a "bell". It's always fun to see the differences in the kids' personalities.

Everyone took a turn sifting the powdered sugar. Look at the sugar flying up in the air!
Rhett is saying "Sift it!" like Father Bear says when making pancakes in a Little Bear movie.
The dough had to be refrigerated for three hours so they had to find other things to do. Here they are feeding the Nutcracker a nut from Alexee's back yard collection.
After their naps, it was time to roll out the dough and cut out trees, gingerbread men, stars, moose, angels, stockings, cats, etc. I needed 8 hands for this job!

Rhett adding to his cookie sheet.

A & C were fighting over the chair.

After they finished icing their cookies we went to Target so they could do their sibling gift shopping. This year they wanted to buy each other gifts, which I thought was really sweet. We split up and Lane and Alexee went to shop for the boys and I took R & C to shop for A. We met back at the front of the store and I took the kids to the car while Lane checked out. They wanted to wrap and open their gifts tonight, but we told them part of the fun was waiting and being surprised. They let it slip during bath time that they had given each other some (very specific) hints about the gifts they chose for each other. It was cute, but I told them they needed to work on their secret-keeping skills!