It was time… time to do the dreaded gingerbread house/train.  Bryson’s been dragging the box out of the pantry for over a week now, begging to, “please make the train, please!”  I’d been thinking about it since Sunday and decided to finally bite the bullet today.  I’d taken out frozen homemade soup from the freezer and knew it was going to be an easy kitchen night ahead of me – so why the heck not?

The joint project on December 3 made me realize that teamwork is not the best idea for these two boys when it comes to crafty projects – they each want to do EVERYTHING “by my-seffffff.”  Once Bryson was up from his nap, Matthew and I turned on his new favorite show for him (“Justin Time” – OMG it is so cute and we’re so happy to have it back in our daily line-up!) and quietly ran out to the kitchen.  He and I had fun constructing the train before calling Bryson in to help us decorate it.  Bryson just wanted to eat every piece of candy in front of him, and Matthew wanted to do more than I would let him.  I was in a rush because the train was not stable and it was not going to hold for long!  What that meant was, “just help me with the icing and I’ll do the rest quickly.  You can hand me the candy pieces.”  Matthew came and went but Bryson stayed the duration and was super excited to stick on the Wilton sugar figurines I’d picked up at Target for this project.  Honestly, that little Santa, snowman, penguin, elf, and reindeer took this train from being cute to being adorable!

I took a few photos (which is always when I lose my cool because they cannot seem to cooperate during photo-taking these days) and Bryson asked if he could start eating it.  DIG IN!  Within a minute, the train was down (and I caught it on video!) and Matthew came out to help eat it up  🙂

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I had high hopes for this project, but it ended up being just me working on it.  Notice – not a child in sight.

We made two of these foam scenes for Halloween and they were ADORABLE so I thought it would be fun to make one for Christmas too.  It’s cute, but man, it’s a lot of work.  There are no real directions, just pictures of a few steps, and you have to figure out what piece is what.  I thought the boys would love peeling the stickers off the backing, but that kept Bryson busy for only a few minutes before he found deconstructing my buildings to be more fun than peeling stickers  😉  I lost Matthew immediately when he got his own supplies to make a microscope or something – I can’t remember what.  I thought they were binoculars, but I was quickly corrected and I can’t remember what the correction was.  Bad mom.  I was too busy sticking foam pieces onto foam pieces that were attached to foam pieces.  😉

I regret buying the big foam train that’s in the basement, just waiting for us to tackle it.  Maybe we’ll make the gingerbread house tomorrow… much less stressful  🙂

We had a crazy busy day – and I didn’t leave my house!  I spent the ENTIRE day in the kitchen, kicking it off with a fresh-baked coffee cake for my in-laws.  My mother-in-law LOVES coffee cake and after I took one up to her on Thanksgiving, she said that she would love to come for a visit soon at our house and just sit and eat cake and drink coffee together.  So, we did that this morning!  While they were here, she asked me how we made the paint-filled ornaments and because I knew I had a lot ahead of me today, I figured we’d repeat that ornament to show her and to check off the Advent project for the day.  😉  The boys had a great time sharing this with Grandma and Bryson’s ornament looks like it will turn out much better than the first time we did it (I put too much paint flow releaser in his the first time).  Matthew picked some questionable colors that ended up looking awesome!

After the kids went down for a nap/quiet time, I got to work on my fondant decorations for my Christmas Eve cake (I am documenting the building of that cake here).  I finished them up pretty quickly so got to work on dinner (shrimp with garlic and breadcrumbs and roasted green beans – a repeater for sure!).  Our best friend came over for dinner, as she does every Sunday, and we all put the kids to bed rather quickly so we adults could frost sugar cookies. HA!  I am a total cheater and ordered unfrosted cookies from our grocery store because I do NOT like making cut-out cookies.  I love making cakes and pies, but cookies are not my thing (they’re Hottie’s thing!) – so I buy my cookies fresh-baked by the Hy Vee bakery and naked, ready for my frosting and sprinkles.  That’s the way to do it!

A day in the kitchen, on my feet, logging 11,000 steps without a single workout or venture outside of the house.  That’s a lot of cooking!

Bryson’s is the green one, Matthew’s is the blue one, and mine is the gold one.

Ahhh… much better today… sort of.  😉  This project was so simple that I thought maybe Matthew and Bryson would lose interest, but quite the contrary!  All you have to do is put a bunch of glitter and twinkly things in front of these boys and they’re all in.

I bought the clear, picture-holding ornaments at Michaels and then a bunch of filler stuff – glitter, sequins, snowflakes, buttons in the shapes of stockings and the such.  I couldn’t get the packages opened quickly enough for them – they just kept handing them over saying, “I want those, I want THIS!”  The main issue with this ornament is that they can be opened up, and Bryson did that quite quickly back in our bedroom.  There is glitter all over our carpet now  🙂

I don’t want to talk about it.  There was yelling (but not during picture taking).

Sharing the project was a horrible idea and they fought over who got to do what and they lost the beads and hit each other.  This photo is deceiving.

That is all.

😉

I almost forgot about this today after hearing some difficult news. It was about 5:30 when I hopped off the bed and said, “Shit! Our daily project!” I ran downstairs to get the supplies, did a test run, and called the kids in for their turn.

So today, we filled clear acrylic ornaments with paints and shook the hell out of’ em. After the day I’ve had, shaking those ornaments felt great! The kids picked their colors, I pointed them into the ornaments as they squeezed the bottles, I did the initial shake for good paint distribution, and I handed them over to the kids.

THEY LOVED THIS!!!!

This was a great test run because I’m planning to do this with 20 kids at Matthew’s school Christmas party. It will go great!

No pics today of them hanging them on the tree… They’re drying right now in an egg carton!

Oh, and…. I did not raise my voice even once!