The Gingerbread House

Connor got it in his head that we were going to make a gingerbread house at Christmas. If we were at my parents' home, I probably would've hopped right onto this. But we were at Ed's parents' home, and I just didn't think I could handle the mess of four children between the ages of 6 and 8 digging into all that frosting and candy. It would surely turn a small project into a giant mess.

Connor was extremely persistent in his desire to build a house, so finally I told him "We'll build a small village when we get home! If we build the house here, we won't be able to enjoy it at our house since we can't easily transport it!". This, of course, is the oldest and stupidest parenting trick in the book. Talk a kid out of doing something you don't want to do today - by promising something even better / worse in the future!

He fell for it. They always do. Parents always hold out that this will turn from an even bigger parenting loss to a parenting win, hoping the kid forgets what they were begging to do. For the record, I cannot recall a single time this has worked in my favor. But I still have hope.

Santa did her part to make the building of the house as painless as possible. She brought Connor a gingerbread house building kit.

And guess what? When I finally did bust it out a few weeks ago (after Christmas had passed, but before Epiphany), Connor and Helen hardly made a mess. And...they decided to wait until NEXT YEAR to build that village, because then we can start early and really, really make a lot of houses.

Elaine