Snow Day

Gingerbread Intervention

A lopsided seven hour project

The packaging called to me from across the seasonal aisle at Wegman's grocery store. Pictures of mother and child, placing candies on an irresistibly cute gingerbread house. What a wonderful idea, I thought, to decorate a gingerbread house with the children over the Thanksgiving weekend.

Not so, my dear friends, not so. If you have heard the siren call of the pre-baked gingerbread house kits, I am here to provide an intervention.

First, you have to make the mortar. Technically, this involves ingredients common to all icing mixtures. The difference is that it will have approximately the same consistency as wet Playdough, with twice the mess. Since I don't own a pastry-bag to pipe the icing, I modified a Zip-Lock baggie by snipping a hole in the corner of the bag.

Do not do this. The icing (commonly known as "royal" icing, since it is a royal pain in the *$$) is so thick it will simply burst out of the top of the bag, and adhere itself to your hands. Have you ever seen The Blob? It's like that, only this blob is also capable of inducing a diabetic coma.

At approximately this time, your four year old will wander in and say, "COOL! A gingerbread house! Can I help?" The answer is NO. Do not let any child come into contact with either the gingerbread or the cement-like icing. You will be sorry for it. Very, very sorry. It may be weeks until you get the icing-spackle out of their hair. Consider yourself warned.

After you get the walls up, you have to wait two hours for the icing to harden before installing the roof. During this time, you will hear the following phrases repeated every two minutes:

"Can I put candies on it yet? Can we eat it? Can I play with it yet?"

After two hours, the icing will have hardened. This also includes the first batch of icing you made, since the ziplock baggie has burst. The next phase involves making more icing, installing the roof, and waiting another two hours.

"Why is it taking so long, Mommy? WHHHYYYYYY?"

Once the construction phase is over, the decoration can begin. This phase should also be done sans children. If you do this with your children, they will eat about half the candy (and icing), get royal-pain-in-the-*$$-icing all over the kitchen, and possibly knock down a gingerbread wall. Also, they will get frustrated when the candies don't actually stick to the walls. This will add whining and crying into the sticky-hands-sugar-hyped mess.

I just ate about 1,000,000 gumdrops.

I finally kicked the kids outside and finished decorating the house. I made gumdrop trees, tried to spackle on some "icicles," and included a cute little gingerbread Santa Claus on the outside of the house.

Santa or a Shriner? You decide.

The house took 7 hours to create. Seven. Whole. Hours. I was going to move the finished product to our dining room table, but the icing has dried to the counter top. It will remain on the kitchen counter, possibly forever.

At least, I thought to myself, it is a cute little wintry wonderland scene.

Then the four year old came inside.

"Wow, Mom! That is a really spooky witch's house!"

Four-year-old children are harsh critics

I now spend approximately 50% of every day chasing children away from the candy-coated "witch's" house. We'll see how long it lasts!

Bake-a-Palooza

I love Thanksgiving. I love the cozy days home with the family, basking in the warmth of a fire while the lake effect snow falls outside. This is Western New York, after all, and we nearly always have snow on Thanksgiving.

Most of all, I love the baking. I love the delicious smells coming from the kitchen, and the goodies stocked all over the house.

Oreo turkey cookies

Aunt Leta's marvelous sugar cookies

As I was deep in the throes of my pre-Thanksgiving bake-a-thon, Nolan wandered into the kitchen.


Now, really, is my cooking that bad? I promise I won't set the house on fire today, little guy!

Four Year Old Gratitude

Matt's classroom project this week was to create a "place mat of gratitude," where he cut out pictures from magazines that represent the things that have the most meaning to him. Matt's place mat is an ode to the bizarre inner workings of a four year old brain:


Matthew is thankful for:

Abbey. The little four year old sweetheart in his Pre-K class. The lovebirds are still going strong.

A pink seahorse and a yellow starfish. Because, obviously, colorful sea animals are awesome.

Behr Paint Chip, Mint Green. Interior decorating deserves a lot of gratitude.

Gummy Vitamins. We should all be thankful for nutrition masquerading as candy. It's brilliance in marketing at its finest.

A T.V. That beloved opiate of the masses.

A happy horse. Sad horses are the pits.

The color blue. Should I be concerned that he selected the life insurance advertisment for this one?

Playing in the leaves. Best. Fun. Ever.

A dog. We don't have a dog. This is Matt's attempt at subliminal advertising- he wants a dog.

Mom. Awww... (position on aforementioned dog weakening). I'm thankful for you, too, little buddy.

Who Needs Toys?

Leftover paint cans and scrap wood are all Matt needs to be happy. He invented a game (with rather complex and ever-changing rules) involving a croquet set and the "cave" created out of our garage junk. The basic rules involved whacking a ball into the cave and then running around bases.




Unfortunately, I now have to go and clean up all the "bases" before the snow starts falling. "Cave Ball" isn't exactly a winter sport!

Ready For School

Why I Have Prematurely Gray Hair

A while back, I purchased the boys a tumbling mat. I figured they could do somersaults and other basic tumbling moves on the mat, letting off some steam on the days we're stuck indoors.

What I didn't anticipate was Matthew using the mat to practice for the next Olympic skeleton event.



House rule #547: No bobsledding down the stairs!

Cheap, Cheap, Cheapity-Cheap

I found a recipe for liquid laundry detergent online. While I'm not going to have a bazillion babies, the frugality of the Duggar recipe caused a shiver to go down my spine. A load of laundry done with commercial detergent costs about $0.20 per load. A load of laundry done with home-made laundry soap costs about $0.01 per load. This stuff costs about $2 for 10 gallons.

I did read (from online reviews) that the mixture can sometimes form "lumps" and doesn't mix well. Since I have a talent for getting bovine serum albumin and rabbit brains to go into solution*, I figured the laundry mix shouldn't pose too much of a challenge.

My dear husband thinks I have lost my mind. With the right set of ingredients purchased (along with a 5 gallon bucket), I made the detergent. It is now sitting in the laundry room until it cools off and obtains the right gel-like consistency.

I really hope it works!



*I used to work as a biologist for an in-vitro diagnostic device manufacturer, making coagulation reagents. The rabbits were from the Lucky Rabbit Company. Seriously. We turned them into rabbit brain powder- I'll leave the rest of the mental imagery up to you.

Update: This stuff really works! Not only does it work, but it actually works better than our commercial HE detergent. I always knew my inner scrooge frugality would pay off!

Dinsoaurs!

Ice Time

I think this means I'm a "hockey mom."

Matthew's time in the "Learn to Skate" program has come to an end. We had to decide whether to place him in Beginner Hockey or to continue the "Learn to Skate" figure skating program. At his last Learn to Skate session, we explained to Matt that his best friend would no longer be on the ice with him. His little buddy had moved over to the Beginner Hockey program, and Matt was quite saddened by this fact.

I did walk over to observe the Beginner Hockey program, and was quite pleased with what I saw. The children pick their own color jersey and number, and skate in various games to increase skating skills related to the game of hockey. There is no actual competition at this stage, and safety is paramount. I also noticed that several other friends from Matt's preschool program were in the program.

The coach goes around to each child after the game and checks to make sure one thing has been accomplished:

"Do you have a sweaty head?"

Each enthusiastic little hockey player yells back, "YES!"

Then I looked at the cost (I am frugal, if nothing else). The "Learn to Skate" program is $65 for seven weeks. The Beginner Hockey program is $200, for the entire year. That money includes all equipment (from the helmet, skates, pads, and stick to the duffel bag). Even the USA Hockey membership is free for children under the age of six. Plus, the kids get to skate twice per week, as opposed to once per week with the figure skating lessons. I was sold.

We signed Matthew up, put him in his gear, and set him out on the ice.

Nolan helps Matt carry some gear.

Heading out to play with his friends.

He absolutely loves it. His world lights up when he is with his best buddies, banging the stick on the ice to "clap" for his friends, and playing tag with the hockey coaches. Best of all, he gets a "sweaty head."


Let's just hope he stays out of the penalty box!

Interior Design: 4 Year Old Style

Matthew has been flexing his artsy muscles lately, and has been armed with scissors, glue and construction paper on a regular basis. I find drawings, stickers, and "projects" everywhere. Lately, his attention has been turned to decorating his bedroom. I think he is practicing for future dorm-room life, making his own posters.

His use of Scotch tape is impressive. Nearly every surface in the house has some tape on it. The most recent addition was an installation he calls, "Triangles." Who needs a bed skirt when you have a four year old armed with craft supplies?

If his current pace of "creativity" is maintained, I suspect we'll have to take out stock in 3M. In the meantime, I'm off to make another Walmart run- we are completely out of craft materials!

Trick or Treat

In the nick of time, we managed to get the pumpkins carved. There is nothing like procrastination to place a little pressure on your pumpkin carving efforts, especially when all of the stores are sold out of their pumpkin carving knives.

NOT a safety knife

Eviscerating pumpkins is not for cowards

With exactly 50 minutes until trick-or-treating time, Daddy was our hero and arrived home with the very last kit in any of the local stores. We carved our pumpkins, lit the candles, then hustled off for the beginning of trick-or-treating hours.


When we lived in California, we had never heard of official "hours" for trick-or-treating. I am pretty sure this is peculiar to the Midwest/Northeast, but I am quite fond of the idea. Our hours were from 5:30pm-8:00pm, and we went on the earlier side of the allotted time. Having specific hours for trick-or-treating allows the police to keep order, knowing that any teenagers out making mischief after a certain time are not trick-or-treating, but simply causing mayhem. It also lets everyone on the home front have a break- in California, people would still be knocking on the door at 10:00pm in search of candy.

The boys were Spiderman and Obi Wan Kenobi for Halloween. I managed to get a good picture of them in their costumes- the only time they could be seen for the rest of the evening.

Trick-or-treating in Western New York generally involves heavy jackets, and sometimes snow boots. We had some sleet, rain, and even some wet snow pellets while we were gathering treats from the neighbors. Fortunately, we finished gathering candy just in time. The deluge of sleety-rain started as we knocked on the door of the very last house.


I have to say, I am glad Halloween 2010 has come to an end. It was fun, it was sugary, and it was hyper. I am looking forward to a nice, sedate Thanksgiving filled with lots and lots of tryptophan!