What the mailman brought

We have a big ol' mailbox that sits at the road. He's big and sturdy. He replaced a wimpier fellow a year or so ago who wasn't up to the challenge of snowplows pushing big waves of heavy snow and boys in cars playing mailbox baseball. This fellow's a heavyweight with a door that closes and a magnet to keep it closed. And he's BIG!!! Lots of room inside for lots of mail. And, yesterday, we were very glad for all that room because WE GOT MAIL!!!

See how prettily they wrapped it with blue tissue!

We are almost embarrassed to say that even though we are newbies to the world of cookie decorating, Lady Luck shone on us and we won a beautiful copper cookie cutter by Copper Gifts from a giveaway on LilaLoa's blog. We almost didn't enter because there were bound to be lots of other people in the running.....247 to be exact...and there were only 3 cookie cutters to be won. But we did enter! And then we had to wait impatiently for the mailman to deliver our cutter but it was worth the wait! It's beautiful. It's about 4 inches square.....now THAT'S a cookie!  And copper!!! We don't own any copper cooking utensils. This is the first. Oh, my! We can hardly wait to try it out.

We need to thank Karen, too, because she told us a while ago that we were showing up as a No Reply Blogger when we left comments. Huh?? If you're leaving comments on people's blogs and you're not getting answers (or winning stuff!) you should probably check to make sure you've left the correct trail of breadcrumbs for the blogger to get back to you. We sure wouldn't have won this if LilaLoa couldn't have gotten back to us. And that would have been a crying shame. So, thank you to Karen as well.

But that's not all. Our mailbox is so big we also found another box inside. This was an order from Vanilla Food Company. We were a little vexed last week when we went back to Michael's. We wanted to buy more black food colouring pens but only black. Not the assortment we bought the first time around because we're going to run out of black ink long before we run out of red and brown and blue. The pretty lady who works there assured us the pens don't come singly and that was like waving a red flag in front of a bull! Grandma Coco set out to see for herself. And of course, the pretty lady was right. That Michael's store doesn't sell them singly but Vanilla Food Company does!!!! So there! It's a Canadian mail order company and we placed our little order Thursday evening and paid by Paypal. (We love Paypal, especially when we don't really know the company we're dealing with.) Friday morning, we got an email that our order had shipped and that's a really good public relations gesture that more shops should pay attention to. Our package arrived on Monday morning!!! That's pretty fast. We are thrilled with the service and will definitely order from them again. Those squeezy bottles are for flooding icing, just in case you were wondering.

Cassie wasn't wondering. She's pretty much seen it all.

~ Wishing you a full mailbox (but no bills!),