Gingerbread Houses

In December I hosted a Gingerbread house making Playdate. Joel made some frosting the evening before and I had all kinds of decorating candiesAt first the kids were much more interested in playing dress up and with the toys then actually building houses. We also baked gingerbread cookies the night before which we also let the kids all decorate while the mommies built the houses.After we built the houses they were put in the fridge or freezer to solidify so that they were stable enough for little toddler fingers to paint and decorate.In the mean time the kids ate most of the candies and hyped up on sugar set forth to destroy the rest of the house :-) It was so much fun.Here is Satine and Kaylee in their pretty princess dresses all of the kids were excited to dress up.Here are the mommies chatting it up and working on building some houses to decorate. Kathy made two, one for Chloe to do as she would like and another for her to make pretty.Prior to the play date I put away most of the toys that have lot of small pieces. I hid them in my room. But the girls snuck in and found them and started to go through everything, they are such little rascals.Here is LeeLou in her blue princess dress and me trying to make sure they do not dump out all of the kitchen play food.Holly was not really that into decorating the houses so we ended up doing ours on another day and Holly just played with her friends between each of them taking a mommy break to decorate their houses.Once they were sturdy the kids got to use the frosting to paint the houses and then they were able to put all of the candies on the houses.Here is Kaylee decorating her house with LeeLou. There were M&M's, Twislers, Chocolate Ships, Coconut for Snow. We actually made two boxes of frosting, I tried to convince Joel that it would not be enough but we didn't have another box and he was sure we would never use it all.We did in fact run out. But it worked out ok. I had a few store bought tubes for cake decorating that we used to glue the last final houses and since Holly and I skipped doing ours it was fine.This is beautiful Satine's house. Her first one actually collapsed. I felt so bad for her that I let her decorate the one I made, as she was having a lot of fun. I think Holly just didn't have the needed attention span this year, but I will host this play date again next December.Here Holly is giving herself a time out from all of the chaos, a few minutes to herself to draw in the quiet and visit with Mommy. We had about 10 kids over, so it was a big group.When they were all younger it was easy to have so many kids over but now that they are all two and a half to three they are like a pack of wild wolves. I mean that of course in the most loving of ways.Here like cats we tried to wrangle them all into a Christmas tree picture. It is like that commercial where the mom is trying to edit the family picture and the kids are all wrecking havoc.Soon it was nap time and one by one everyone left with the yummy and beautiful Gingerbread houses in tow. Left behind the last remnants of a massive craft project, but with edible yummies.Other rooms, had just as big of a mess, but they weren't so yummy. I was really excited to have our dress up station used by all of the kids and so well received, Holly wasn't playing dress-up before but now she is, I am excited about the new development.