Guest post written by Rachel Owens

Every year I always go to a whole lot of trouble baking Christmas cookies that seem to disappear as soon as my husband and kids descend upon them. Well, I decided that this year I’m not going to bake cookies. Instead, I’m going to just make them. That’s right, I’m going to fix some no-bake cookies instead. I’m not that big of a Scrooge.

I went online to try and see if there were any recipes for no-bake cookies that were especially festive for the holidays and while I was doing that I came across some clear bundle pricing information and decided to order the service.

I already made a batch of classic no-bake Christmas cookies, even though I also plan on making a few different versions of no-bake cookies up until Christmas. I think that for my next batch I might even add in some Christmas-y looking sprinkles to make them look especially festive and because it isn’t the most practical thing in the world to decorate those kinds of cookies with icing like you would regular sugar cookies.

When I got home from work tonight the last thing I wanted to worry about was what to make for dinner.  Since Rich works from home he will usually have something in the oven when I get home.  Tonight there wasn’t anything in the oven since he had a busy day and hasn’t been feeling great.  So, when I said, “What’s for dinner?”  he responded, “I don’t know.”

The perfect solution- pizza. So tonight when we didn’t know what to have for dinner, we had some Freschetta pizza and we loved it! Hailey says, “Mmmmmmm!”

The pizza is super easy to make!  Depending on which one you get, it goes in the oven for around 20-30 minutes.  The dough is rolled and kneaded so that it rises like fresh dough would rise while it cooks in your oven.  The result is pizza that tastes like freshly made homemade pizza, not something from the freezer.

It’s the perfect solution to the never ending question of, “What’s for dinner?”

Guest post written by Nicole London

I guess that some people may say that a Barbie is kind of an early gift for a 3-year-old, but I decided to go ahead and buy one for my daughter. She’s really into playing with baby dolls anyway so it would only make sense that she would love Barbies.

But I actually got the idea to give her that for Christmas when I was out shopping for my niece. She’s 6 and my sister told me to just pick her out a Barbie for Christmas. So when I was looking at Barbies online I was thinking about how much I was looking forward to buying Barbies for my daugther. That’s actually also when I found some information about a new internet service and I chose to sign up for one of its packages for our home internet service.

Well, I went ahead and ordered a really simple Barbie for her so that there wouldn’t be a bunch of small parts for her to put in her mouth. When I open it for her I’m going to take away the shoes and any other small parts.

Part of the fun of being little is playing dress up. One of Hailey’s favorite things to do is to get dressed up and play pretend. And I know that when I was teaching pre-k the most popular center during free play was the dramatic play area- where kids could dress up and pretend to be whoever they wanted to be. And it’s certainly the same with Hailey- one day she is pretending to be Cinderella, the next she is Lilo (from Lilo and Stitch) and lately she has been Captain Hook. Watching her imagination at work is so much fun!