Determined to surprise the kids with something fun on one of their afternoons off, I bought the Ikea gingerbread house kit. I told them about it the previous day and we went to the store and bought goodies to go on the house. Candy galore!
And then I followed some advice about icing glue...just melt sugar and voila: A perfect glue with which to stick it all together, easy peasy.
Except I think I overcooked my glue. By the time I got everyone around the table to start it was almost rock-like. Then I tried anyway and the candy-like 'icing' stuff turned into strings of hardened uck. And it was already too dry to be glue.
So, I laughed, took a deep breath and moved on in fun.
NO that is not what I did.
If only I had done that. No. I threw a little mommy fit, complained about my ruining their fun....yada yada. I called David out of his home office (usually a big no-no for me). HELP ME!
And he did. And he brought the humor. My huffings and puffings subsided. He tried again. It still didn't work. I tried the original way, icing sugar, etc. and it was what it was. Finally David and the kids just started piecing things however and piling things on. A mumbo jumbo of creativity. And they had a blast!
(in the fray of googling solutions we learned that many a mommy-fit has been thrown when it comes to gingerbread houses...not for the faint of heart my friends)
I did apologize to them for my little fit and got in on the action with them.
What do you think? They even got the chimney on.
Thanks David for saving the day!
This is still what I think about it...
There is candy inside too...
Sophia reminded us that this was not structurally sound, the others were putting too much weight on...she was right, by morning it had caved in.
We named it our ZELZELE house. This is the Persian word for Earthquake and was the name of a town in our Advent read-aloud, Ishtar's Odyssey. (This is our third year reading this series, we highly recommend it). The town had been through a big earthquake. Our house looked like it too:
