Gingerbread house decorating

Every year I take a day and design, bake and asseble two (yes, two!) gingerberad houses. Each year I try and make them smaller than the last year, and each year I fail. This year the houses were 18 inches by 24 inches! This is why I am not a structural engineer!

I also make the mistake of trying to create and assemble them on the same day as we are going to decorate them. It has never been a problem in the past, but I am always concerned at how sturdy they are. I always vow that next year I will make them the day before, and every year I do not. I always make the gingerbread from scratch and it is delicious, so I also have been afraid that it will taste stale if I make them too far in advance. So far my crazy method has worked. We have been doing this for 13 years!

So, this year we invited James' sister and her family over to decorate the second house. We were all having a great time. There were candies and icing flying everywhere as the houses were

decorated and looking wonderfully and deliciously beautiful. Christmas carols were playing cheerfully in the background.

Then Victoria decided to take a larger candy (a fruit slide gummy for those of you who know what those are) and firmly press it onto the lower edge of the side wall. Well, the icing had not set and the wall caved in completely!! I tried to take a picture of the house before it all caved in, but

alas it went too quickly!

All the pieces caved in on each other and the candies flew in all directions!!

But all was not lost! Now we could unabashedly dive into our house and start eating the candies and the gingerbead without any reaservation!! The gingerbread was delicious and the icing was buttercream (real butter!!). We pigged out! It was GREAT!

Vieve and the Tree

Vieve loves our tree. She is just tall enough to get all the ornaments off the bottom of the tree. She is such a curious explorer.

She carefully pulls herself up and then balances until she gets her ornament of choice, then she explores it (usually by taste :) and then her sisters dutifully put it back up on the tree when she goes for another one! Adorable!

Santa

Here are the girls with Santa. I love these pictures :)

Decorating the Tree

This year we waited a little longer to decorate the tree- last year we put it up too early and the kids broke a bunch of ornaments! But they were begging to set it up, so we did. Naomi, Victoria and Olivia helped a lot and Genevieve quickly figured out how to get the ornaments off the bottom!

Decorating cookies

Every year we make, cut out, bake and decorate cookies and then EAT them :) Yummmmmm. The kids love it and it is so much fun. The kids and I share the same philosophy- the more icing the better!
Even Vievey got to try them!

Victoria the gymnast

Victoria is doing gymnastics this year and is loving it. This is the first thing she has tried that she really loves doing. She is very good at it and it seems to come naturally for her. You should see her doing cartwheels!!!

This picture is at the end of her first fun-meet with her ribbons and certificate. She was amazing, and had a great time.

Our Genevieve.

She is such a delight. She is always smiling and happy. She loves to crawl around, exploring the house, getting into her sisters toys and climbing the stairs and giving me a heart attack! :)

We all are crazy about her- who wouldn't be??

Candy Corn teeth

I just had to put this picture in! She is so funny!

Trick-or-treating this year was soooo pleasant this year. It was warm enough that we did not need coats (or long underwear!!!). My Mom came over to hand out candy and so we all got to go out. Victoria went with the older girls from across the street and we took the younger ones. This neighbourhood is packed with kids and they were everywhere. There were line-ups at doors 10 kids deep in some areas!! It was amazing!

Olivia was great. She marched up to the doors and tried to carry her bag of candy. We were out for over an hour before she wanted to be carried!

It was a great Halloween! The candy lasted for almost one month- which is amazing because my kids all have a sweet tooth and if they wanted candy after school they had to share it with the day-home kids too!

A cat, fairy, unicorn and bunny!

What a funny Halloween we had this year. Usually my kids have no idea what they want to be for Halloween and we just go downstairs on the 31st and pick something. We have a small collection of costumes down there in various sizes. That was not the case this year. Victoria came to me early in October and told me she wanted to be a wood fairy for Halloween and then proceeded to explain what her costume would look like. So, luckily I had almost one month to make it happen. She was very happy with the final result! :)

Naomi wanted to be a unicorn and knew that early in the month- luckily we already had that costume downstairs and it still fit her- she was a unicorn last year too. I hope she wants to be something different next year because I do not think it will fit her again next year.

Olivia was a little black cat and she was adorable! She was very excited about her tail. She thought it was pretty neat!

Genevieve did not have much choice regarding her costume. She was a bunny- and a very cute bunny at that! That meant that I did not have much choice either- I was a Mommy bunny. It worked out quite well.

James had won some boxing gloves the week before at a work event (yes, they were pink- the poor guy is surrounded by women at work, then comes home to a house full of women and then when he gets the chance to win a 'manly' think like boxing gloves they turn out to be pink!!). James went as a boxer.

Decorating Pumpkins

This Halloween we had a lot of fun decorating pumpkins. The first ones we did were at Victoria's school. They wanted a lot of parent volunteers, so I showed up with all the kids (what other choice do I have?). Luckily they had extra pumpkins for Naomi and Olivia. I was grateful and they had a great time. Victoria was so happy we were there too. She really loves it when we come to her school and do things like this with her.


So, Victoria made a bird pumpkin, Olivia made a crab- with Victoria's help, and Naomi found every sparkly thing on the table and put that on her pumpkin. She is such a girly-girl :)

Pumpkins were hard to come by in Okotoks this year. They had a lot in early October, but most of them had gone rotten by the third week and by Halloween there was not a pumpkin to be found! We were given these little ones by Naomi's preschool teacher- they were done with them at school and took pity on us! We were grateful. We did find one big pumpkin and carved it with Daddy on Halloween!

Thanksgiving

We had a quiet Thanksgiving this year (not that it is ever too raucous!). My Mom came and we had a chicken (cooking a Turkey would be silly as we would never eat enough of it to make it worthwhile, so every year we cop-out and get a chicken...). I would have taken a picture of my gorgeous Victoria, but she would not let me- she was being a little grumpy- can you tell?

In our backyard

Today the kids absconded the camera and took a bunch of pictures of them playing in the backyard. I thought I would include them so you could see some pictures of what our backyard looks like!

Standing up!!

Today I could not believe my eyes when I went to go get Genevieve from her nap! There she was standing up in her crib! She is only 6 months old!!! Sit down- I am not ready for her to be so mobile (crawling), let alone getting ready to walk.

She was so proud of herself and she was so cute! I wonder how long it will take her to start walking....

Individual shots

Family Pictures

We were very lucky that the weather held this year because we were not organized enough for a family picture until well into October. The evening was perfect and we managed to get down to the park just at the perfect time- sunset. We were very happy with the pictures- not that it is hard to take great pictures of such cute kids (if I do say so myself- I can't help it I am a proud Mom!)