Thank you so much for asking! The party was great - had a few last minute cancellations since there was a softball tournament the same day and their kids were on teams that kept winning, but I am thrilled that the girls did well so it was all good. The menu was everything listed above, except I skipped the ice cream sandwich thing - it was overkill, and I am glad I did. Several friends (who know me well) know that dessert is usually not my thing, so they all brought desserts! The contributed a pecan pie, a walnut caramel cheesecake (OMG it was delish!), a strawberry cheesecake, and a huge plate of chocolate chip cookies and chocolate covered pretzels. Everyone had a blast and the hat parade was a riot. My GF had been in San Diego on business a few weeks earlier and bought a fascinator there. It was incredible - purple, black illusion lace, black feathers... just amazing and she looked so beautiful in it. I was happy she won, since she has had a tough year battling breast cancer. I am already looking forward to next year! Alexa

There are lots of recipes out there, but I used Alton Brown's. Homemade Soft Pretzels Recipe courtesy Alton Brown, 2007 Prep Time: 30 min Inactive Prep Time: 1 hr 0 min Cook Time: 25 min Level: Intermediate 8 pretzels * 1 1/2 cups warm (110 to 115 degrees F) water * 1 tablespoon sugar * 2 teaspoons kosher salt * 1 package active dry yeast * 22 ounces all-purpose flour, approximately 4 1/2 cups * 2 ounces unsalted butter, melted * Vegetable oil, for pan * 10 cups water * 2/3 cup baking soda * 1 large egg yolk beaten with 1 tablespoon water * Pretzel salt Combine the water, sugar and kosher salt in the bowl of a stand mixer and sprinkle the yeast on top. Allow to sit for 5 minutes or until the mixture begins to foam. Add the flour and butter and, using the dough hook attachment, mix on low speed until well combined. Change to medium speed and knead until the dough is smooth and pulls away from the side of the bowl, approximately 4 to 5 minutes. Remove the dough from the bowl, clean the bowl and then oil it well with vegetable oil. Return the dough to the bowl, cover with plastic wrap and sit in a warm place for approximately 50 to 55 minutes or until the dough has doubled in size. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Line 2 half-sheet pans with parchment paper and lightly brush with the vegetable oil. Set aside. Bring the 10 cups of water and the baking soda to a rolling boil in an 8-quart saucepan or roasting pan. In the meantime, turn the dough out onto a slightly oiled work surface and divide into 8 equal pieces. Roll out each piece of dough into a 24-inch rope. Make a U-shape with the rope, holding the ends of the rope, cross them over each other and press onto the bottom of the U in order to form the shape of a pretzel. Place onto the parchment-lined half sheet pan. Place the pretzels into the boiling water, 1 by 1, for 30 seconds. Remove them from the water using a large flat spatula. Return to the half sheet pan, brush the top of each pretzel with the beaten egg yolk and water mixture and sprinkle with the pretzel salt. Bake until dark golden brown in color, approximately 12 to 14 minutes. Transfer to a cooling rack for at least 5 minutes before serving.

It will just be two of us for Christmas eve. We usually do seafood. Crab or lobster or something. I have 2 frozen tails. That might work. Or we might have fondue in front of the fire..... hmmmm Christmas day we are doing Thanksgiving over again. My daughter had pneumonia over Thanksgiving so she missed dinner here and said she really missed the turkey and stuffing we make. So it will be turkey part deux. Just 4 of us. Her and her BF and us. This weekend she is spending one night so we will be baking together on Sat. We haven't done that in years. Only making a few things as non of us want to eat it all. Mostly for gifts. Making biscotti and fudge and truffles. She will bring her dog.... so 2 dogs and 4 cats in the house. The cats will hide all day and the dogs will chase each other... will be a zoo here!

You are doing great! And it sounds like you are doing some of the same things that I am! At the moment, I'm procrastinating (taking a break) from cleaning up my worktable so it can get in gear for Christmas. It's been the world's slowest quilting station for the past few months (in that I only get to it a few minutes here and there), but now I need to change gears and put that away for a short while to start getting packages ready to ship- within the next 2 weeks :) Medical stuff is interesting in some ways. It's not something that I've had a great deal of experience with, but am getting a little more. From my perspective, I would keep the more bureaucratic end of things in a 'to be shredded' type situation, and keep information pertaining to your actual medical health in chronological order for the long term. Sometimes it's helpful to look back at your medical reports/results over the long term. In some cases you can probably do this online, but I can say for myself that keeping paperwork that you can lay out and look at can be very useful. I'll give you a very recent example. This week, DH got results from a routine blood test that said it was out of acceptable limits. Very quickly we were able to pull out paperwork results from the last time he had these tests from two different sources (4yrs and9 yrs) and the levels were almost identical- and considered normal then. This was incredibly helpful for us to not panic and to come up with suitable questions regarding what is going on (i.e. was it suppose to have been a fasting test they did, but they forgot to mention that to him?) This is a little bit difficult to write about, so I will try to keep it succinct, but last year a family member of ours overdosed on RX drugs. What happened was he messed up his brain and essentially made himself a dementia type patient for 5 months, unable to care for himself. During that time, we ended up setting out and tracking down as much medical information as we could about him, because he was not capable of answering questions from a standpoint of reality. It would have been much easier had we had paper copies from his home to begin with. For the first few months, we didn't have an accurate medical picture of who he had been for the past years (he is a hermit, for lack of a better word) which made his doctor's appointments a hit-and-miss proposition. In the end, my DH ended up collecting everything we were able to get from the past few years, and filing it in chronological order inside of a binder. I would definitely go that book-style route again with medical records and decide on the topic whether they should be kept for 2 years, 5 years, indefinitely. Right now, DH, DD and I are able to keep all our medical stuff in a small folder, but as we get older and have more things going on, I will probably look into using a binder, maybe even filing by year with page separators? Hope you find a good system and get your packages out on time :)