Prairie Potholes: The 12 Days of Christmas #9

Don't let them fool you, not even for a minute. The holiday season with toddlers is insanity at its finest. I turned them loose in the living room, unsupervised, and guess what? There were tree ornaments strewn about the place. The wrapped presents had become trampolines to my boy and my little girl, bless her heart, was organizing the ones that weren't being jumped on.

So I brought them into the kitchen while I cooked and turned them loose with Play-doh. As my kids have become more adept at using the Play-doh accessories in the past few weeks, I have come to two conclusions. One: kids don't understand the whole idea of color purity, and they don't really care if their mother does or not. They don't have panic attacks when the pink is shoved in the same container with the green and they don't understand that all of their Play-doh will soon turn a homogeneous shade of reddish-brown.

The second conclusion is that the Play-doh people are wacked. Not only does the Play-doh get stuck to the screw thing in the middle, but as you turn it, it shoots marble size amounts of Play-doh several feet in the air much to the kids' delight and their mother's horror. Try it on carpet for extra fun!

After I got the Play-doh cleaned up and the kids to bed, I returned to the holiday baking. As I mixed peanut butter and lard and cornmeal and flour and bird seed, Danish Cowboy asked me what I was making. "Uh, bird food suet cakes." He laughed at me. We'll see who's laughing when I serve him bird food suet cakes for breakfast tomorrow.

As you can see, the Christmas spirit is truly alive and well around here. This pumpkin roll cracked as I was rolling it. But I think I salvaged it with a whole roll of plastic wrap and some fridge time.

And the filling for the pumpkin rolls turned out to be chunky cream cheese rather than the more traditional smooth cream cheese. But it's only for family, so who cares? A little powdered sugar, a hefty dose of whipped cream and no one will know.

My sister saved the day as always with fruit and cheese. If you will recall, produce is limited around here to clementine oranges that cost $2.57 each and may or may not be edible.