Today's stocking advent calendar activity was to make a gingerbread house. I bought one of those kits from the craft store for it. We decided we would put it together after lunch. When we got started there was some disappointment when we discovered we needed to wait an hour while the walls were drying and then another couple of hours while the roof dried.
Finally the awaited for hour came and we started decorating with candy. Irina and I helped for a little bit, but when I could see that she was clearly getting in the way and just digging her fingers in the icing and licking them, I took her to the other room to keep her occupied while Saren and Harper worked on the rest of the decorating.
About five minutes after they were done and we were about to have dinner, I went to take the gingerbread house off of the table and put it on the counter. I picked it up, got it halfway there, and then it all fell to the floor and broke apart. AAAAGGGHHHH!! OH. EM. GEE. The reason this happened, besides my being an idiot, is that the piece of cardboard that was used as the base, which the instructions told us to use, had a fold in it. It had a fold in it because of the way it was put in the box.
Saren and Harper cried piteously for five minutes while Irina picked up bits of candy off of the floor and ate them. I feel soooo bad. I suck so much. For five minutes, if that, we had a fully decorated gingerbread house. The girls were somewhat mollified by the knowledge that they could now eat the house without ruining anything. Also, that we'll probably try to make some more out of graham crackers later.
4 comments:
Argh! Shoddy packaging like that drives me CRAZY! I hope your homemade version works wonderfully and looks even better.
This *is* a very sad story. I think stuff like this makes for good stories later though. In their teen years your girls will be like, "Remember the year we made that awesome gingerbread house and then Mom dropped it and we cried?"
And you will all be able to laugh about it forever.
At least, those are the kinds of memories that make my sister and I laugh the most these days.
Gah!!! That is terrible.
But at least now you have gingerbread?
Actually, at least now, as Min says, the girls can have a story about actually making a gingerbread house. My aunt promised me for most of my youth that we would make a cookie tree. Our story is how that TOTALLY NEVER HAPPENED, EVER. It's kind of hilarious? But I would have really preferred to have a cookie tree.
Oh! I'm so sorry your house suffered this tragedy. My daughter (20) made a naked gingerbread house for her after-school program kids to decorate. She made the dough and house herself, and it looked great. "Now," I said, when she finished, "Before you take it to the center for the kids to decorate take a deep breath, let it out slowly and r-e-l-e-a-s-e the gingerbread house. You'll have a lot more fun watching the kids decorate it, if you release it first." :D She did, and the kids LOVED decorating it. It was no longer a vision of perfection, but you could see the joy they had decorating! (There's a pic on my blog.)
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