George and I survived the trip to Toys R Us today and it was a raging success. We got everything we wanted, it didn’t take us long to find everything, the castle is absolutely beautiful, and the store wasn’t packed at all. Hooray!
We’re not done, mind you, but I am happy because all the big gifts are done for the girls so I can breathe easy now. We still want to get them a few smaller things and we have to get them each a present for the other, but we can do that on the weekend.
We also have to get the gifts for our families, but I have my list made out of what to get for everyone which is much less stressful than the old, “hmmm let’s see what I can find…” That will also be on the weekend or perhaps Monday. We have to see how our plans go.
While we were out I also got a gingerbread house kit because I think the kids will have a blast with that. I always wanted to do them when I was a kid but we were so busy (plus my mom baked a metric ton of cookies, so it’s not like I was deprived). I told George one of the weirdest things about my youth is that I never put together and decorated a gingerbread house for Christmas until I started dating my Jewish boyfriend when I was 18.
I figure whichever day we don’t go shopping over the weekend can be gingerbread day, but even if we’re too busy, Hayley is off school all next week anyway so we could do it Monday if we had to.
George and I also got ourselves an early Christmas gift. We don’t exchange gifts since having the kids, but we usually buy something for both of us. While I would have loved a Wii (with a Wii Fit!) it wasn’t going to be realistic! Our oven’s wiring is shot. The stove part works fine but the oven doesn’t work. Since we can’t really get a whole new stove right now, we got ourselves a Black & Decker rotisserie and convection oven (it’s this one, though we paid much less than that, it was on sale!). You can cook and bake pretty much anything in it. We had a roast beef tonight and it came out perfect and was delicious.
I’m relieved because for totally unknown, random reasons, our Yule dinner tradition is to have meat pie for supper and that wasn’t going to fit in a toaster oven. I was also disappointed that we’d have to leave store bought cookies out for Santa but I can fit a small baking sheet in the convection oven – making the cookies with the kids is part of the December 24th fun.
I’m just glad I survived the first leg of the shopping. Let’s hope the rest is just as successful!
Several years ago, my MIL bought us a similar counter top oven that was convection and all that. We didn’t understand why she would buy us that since we had a perfectly good oven/stove. Jump all the details and I will tell you that we are now on our third counter top convection oven, having used the previous two until they simply died of exhaustion. I hardly ever use my full size oven and have even learned to bake cookies in the convection and breads in my crockpot. You will LOVE this gift you bought for yourselves!