After our solar Saturday, the sun may not have stuck around for Sunday, but we had a very sweet Sunday all the same. We awoke to a centimeter of snow--just enough to bleach our brown landscape mostly white. Even though the snow was shallow, the first snowfall of the winter always brings festive magic into the air. We attended church via Zoom video call, and when the organist played songs, I played along with her on our piano at home so we could sing nice and loud. It was fun! I never fully realized what a huge part of church worship singing is until we couldn't sing in church. Our ward is still meeting in person, but without singing and with the sacrament saved for the end after the Zoom feed ends, we are fine with joining from afar for now.
After Zoom church and home sacrament, Jeff went to the church to do his financial clerking while the rest of us began an epic three hour Sweet Sunday bake-a-thon! Rose and Amber joined me in the kitchen, sometimes helping, sometimes hindering, always in the middle of the action. We turned on Christmas music by the Tabernacle Choir and the Carpenters and sang while we worked. First we made the week's dinner foods: a big pot of soup and a double batch of meatloaf patties. We started four loaves of bread rising too. Then we made Christmas cookies: snowtops and snowballs. Since cookie-making is not my favorite activity on the planet, I decided to make massive double batches of both varieties to give myself more time between the next cookie-making-session.
Amber said "I want to be a really good cook like you, Mommy." Guileless flattery totally works, and even though I generally keep energetic Amby away from the hot stove, I let her stir the soup as long as she wanted. I like cooking on Sunday afternoons because it's an activity that my daughters enjoy, and we generally have more time and energy for cooking on Sundays than on weeknights. Quality time with my kids while doing something productive is an all around win!
Just as I was mixing up the snowballs with a daughter at each elbow (somehow I didn't give them black eyes), Jay and Ian came to the door and invited the girls to go play outside with ice and snow in the canal. They dashed off to bundle up, leaving me alone in a messy kitchen with about 250 un-formed cookies and four loaves of rising bread. I couldn't. So I called in reinforcements in the form of my husband, giving him the option to either help with the cookies or just hang out with me while I worked. Being the stellar human that he is, he opted to help roll snowball cookies. With a brief explanation, I turned him loose with the bowl, scoop, and pan.
While Jeff scooped snowballs, I mixed chocolate snowtop dough. The double batch filled our KitchenAid mixing bowl to the BRIM. Thankfully, that dough had to chill in the fridge before being scooped into cookies, so we were off the immediate hook there. After less than 10 minutes of playing outside, Rose opened the door sobbing "Jay and Amber won't stop throwing snow at me!" Seriously, child? I told her to go get back at them or maybe even play farther away from them in the wide expanse of countryside. She went back out to play, with vengeance on her brow. Ten minutes later, Rose came back in, dripping wet from the knees down. She had broken through the ice into the canal! I had to laugh. It was 35 degrees outside at coldest, so the ice was getting quite thin. The girls decided that they were done playing with the boys outside.
Meanwhile, Jeff was almost done with his massive pan of 113 snowballs. He had about five cookies to go with no space left on the pan. When I looked over, he was methodically scooting each cookie over with infinitesimal nudges to create space for those final five. I laughed and laughed, watching his over-exaggerated meticulousness. Spoiler alert: he fit all 118 snowballs onto the pan.
Once the snowballs were in the oven, we gathered the rosy-cheeked children and listened to the final chapter in the Book of Mormon together. It was our second time ever finishing the Book of Mormon as a family, and it felt great! At the beginning of the year, I wasn't sure we'd manage all 531 pages in one year (last time it took us four years to read thee whole ting together), but we decided to listen to the audio recording this time and it was just right. The Book of Mormon is full of light and truth, and I am so thankful to share it with my family. We don't remember to read every day, and the days we do read often have less than optimal attention, but effort matters. We love the Book of Mormon!
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