Gingerbread man cut-outs and simple spaghetti (Celebration #13)

Let us agree not to talk about the majority of today. My week: it's not going great.

But we did get a good celebration in today. The Emperor and I decorated some paper cut-outs of gingerbread men! He loves gingerbread men almost as much as he loves Frosty 'noman.



He was very delighted with the one that I made and has been telling me since I finished it that it's his. Which is not factually speaking true, which I've told him, but you know, he's two so sometimes you have to cut him a little slack on the truth front. It's not his fault that I've already been to preschool and he's still working his way through it... developing his skills at gluing things to other things... he'll get there eventually. Here's his guy:



Actually, I really like his. It's got a sort of um... terrified look on its face? It's good!

I finally hung up the crafts we've already made a couple of days ago, so as soon as we were done the gingerbread men, I added them to the Christmas wall. (Actually, it's a door, but that's neither here nor there.) Starting to look pretty fun, at least according to the Emperor and me.



Christmas cards are going on the door too, along the edge-- you can just barely see one of our first two on the top left corner of the picture. (Hmm. Only two Christmas cards on Dec 13th? I think this is going to be a slow year...)



Simple dinner tonight: whole wheat spaghetti with broccoli and Trader Joe's chicken-less strips with lemon juice and garlic. Josh and I had a bit of olive oil & salt and pepper on our noodles; the Emperor had his plain (of course). He ate a huge bowl of broccoli while waiting for the rest of the stuff to cook, then ate noodles and chik'n strips. Success!

Is it just me or are there a lot more types of noodles at the average grocery store than there used to be? Sometimes I am just in the mood for a big bowl of plain-ish noodles and it seems like my options are a lot greater than they were even five or six years ago... I love that I can find brown rice noodles (my favorite!) basically anywhere I go now. Maybe it's a California thing though.

Here's the Emperor loving his noodles: