Gingerbread Extravaganza!

This week we made gingerbread sleighs to decorate as a family! When Jed was growing up they used to do this every Christmas. I got the recipe and instructions from Jed's mom, Michel, a few years ago, and now I enjoy keeping the tradition alive with our family.

Benjamin helped me roll out the gingerbread dough... Here he is giving it all he's got! Luckily this heavily floured piece of dough was all the unwanted leftover bits put together. :)

Jed creates real masterpieces on his gingerbread sleighs. He makes cool scenes on all the sides: a pine tree in the snow, a Santa head, wrapped gifts, a star, a snowman.... He's a real artist!

I'm not so creative. That's why I decorated four sleighs in the time that it took him to decorate two. :)

Jed showed Benjamin how to put a wart on his nose. Jed said they used to do this when they were kids, so apparently he is just trying to keep ALL the traditions alive. :) Jed was definitely the instigator -- by 'gluing' mini m&ms on the front of all of his teeth and smiling at us with a silly grin (and a few silly warts on his nose too!). :)

Benjamin decorated a house and some gingerbread men while we decorated the sleighs. It was hilarious to watch him! He would do a big layer of frosting, then a layer of candies, then a huge layer of frosting again, and so forth...

After we were through with decorating, Benjamin took this picture. I was pretty impressed! Most of his pictures don't turn out so well - many of them are of himself, with the camera angled for a great picture up his nose. :)
Even though Eliza slept through our Gingerbread sleigh decorating, she was able to fully participate in our Graham Cracker House decorating party this morning! I invited a few friends over and we all decorated houses with our kids. At the beginning, I was helping Benjamin get started while Eliza sat in her booster across the table with a graham cracker house. She didn't have a frosting bag or any candy within reach, and so I guess she looked at the house and figured the only thing to do was start eating it. I looked up just as she was chowing down on the roof. How hilarious!
She had a fun time decorating her house. After a while of dutifully putting candies where I put the frosting, she realized that she COULD be eating this candy instead. Thus began an internal debate every time I gave her a candy to put on the dollop of frosting: "Should I eat this or should I put it on my house???" Eventually she decided to take a bite out of each of the candies and THEN put it on the house. Every time I gave her a candy, she would say, "a taste" and then take a bite out of it before putting it on the house. It quickly went downhill, and soon she was simply not interested in wasting any more candy on her house. When we were all done and cleaning up, I saw her picking off and eating the nice row of m&ms we had put on her roof at the beginning. What a sorry looking gingerbread house that was, with a gaping hole in the roof, half-eaten gumdrops all over it, and a row of missing m&ms from the top! :)