Gingerbread Houses

In October I brought home a little craft book for children published by Martha Stewart.  Alyx latched onto it, as she does with so many books.  (At present it is a My Little Pony book entitled Rainbow Rocks.  She eats with it, plays with it by her side, and even sleeps with it on her pillow.)  Inside it she found a series of graham cracker houses decorated in different themes.  She would constantly return to the page and dream about her faux gingerbread creation.  She would ask every few days if today was the lucky day.  I knew if we made one in October or November we would have to make another one in December, so I put her off.  Because gingerbread houses, even easy peasy ones kind of exhaust me.  There is always a mess to clean up.  And guess who gets to do the cleaning up?  For some reason it’s never them.

As you can see by these lovely little snapshots we managed to scrounge up some graham crackers and candy and even frosting my niece left in my fridge at Thanksgiving.  I needed to start making dinner and the kids needed something to keep them from fighting or making other messes around the house so Lu’s little house was finally, at long last, constructed.

Each house stood together for a total of about five minutes because the frosting my niece made was cream cheese frosting, not exactly the sort of thing one would use for sweet cement to hold a cookie house together.  But it served the purpose; the kids were happy and they had something sweet to eat and it felt like Christmas.

From a strictly mental memory of the project I remember it feeling messy and crazy and a lot of frustration about those darn floppy walls.  But, looking at these pictures, it seems much happier and sweeter.  I hope as time goes on my mental memory will fade a little more and it will be filled instead with all these happy pictures.  That is until my grown daughter calls me up in tears and says “Mom, sometimes it’s so hard being a mom!” And I will be able to say, “I know, honey.  I remember.”