Gingerbread

I'll admit, I've been a slacker on my blog this week.

This week was just very, very busy.

My Mom came out for a visit Tuesday night and into Wednesday. I took advantage of having a babysitter and did some Christmas shopping on Wednesday. Thursday was work like normal. Friday I had a dentist appointment then took Avery to story time. Gabe had an employee only happy hour after work and didn't get home until after I went to bed.

Did I mention that we hosted a holiday party on Saturday?! Yeah, so between all of that, we were cleaning, baking, etc to get ready to host our first party in the new house. And did I mention that I'm almost 34 weeks pregnant?! Yeah, just when cleaning, etc needed to be done, all I wanted to do was sit on my butt and relax with my feet up. Not a good combination.

But I will say that the party was fabulous. We had a great turn out, got to show off the house, had some great food and even better company. It was wonderful!

So today I was thankful that we had nothing to do. ZERO.

Sounded like a good day to relax and bust out the gingerbread house kit I bought for Avery.

I ended up assembling it myself because she was being too grabby with it-she wanted to just reach in and eat the frosting so I took it in the other room to assemble.

After her (no) nap time, we did the decorating. And I think she really enjoyed it! I would put on frosting and just let her have at it. She lined the roof with gumdrops:

And decorated the roof with little colored balls:

And here is her masterpiece (she's saying "cheese"):

Of course all she wanted to do was eat the candy so at times it was hard to get her to actually decorate. I don't blame her though-that's the fun part is getting to eat the stuff that comes with it! But she had a great time and the house stayed together and turned out really cute.

I took a picture of each side of it as well:



Now my question is....do you actually eat these things or what?!

In the Halloween Spirit

So I have to admit, our house is not very spirited this year. See, when we started building our house, we thought we would be moved before Halloween. So....I packed up all of our Halloween stuff and it's not buried in the back of our POD in the driveway. Needless to say, I'm not about to go out there and unbury it for just one day and then have to pack it back up again. It was bad enough that I had to send Gabe out there hunting for Avery's costume that was packed up! Because of this, I don't even know if we'll carve pumpkins this year-I know the carving set is packed away as well.

Since it's a gloomy day out here today, I decided Avery and I would do some Halloween stuff. I did a quick search online for easy crafts and actually had some stuff in my house I could use to make something!

Craft #1: Coffee Filter Ghosts

What you'll need: scissors, string, a coffee filter, a black marker, tinfoil and tape.
Lay out a piece of tinfoil flat on the table and tape a piece of string (whatever length you want the ghost to hang from) in the middle of the foil.


Crumple the foil up into a ball:

Take your coffee filter and draw on a ghost face:

Poke a hole in the top of the coffee filter and thread through the string-the coffee filter will rest on top of the tinfoil:

Display them around your house! (Please ignore the ugly chandelier we have-and yes, it's missing lights!)

Just a note-you're supposed to use a regular coffee filter, but my coffee maker takes the cone shaped filters-they still worked out just fine!

Craft #2: Handprint ghosts

What you'll need: white paper, scissors, a black marker, a pencil

Trace your child's hand on a piece of white paper. Using scissors, cut out the handprint making the wrist area rounded (for the ghost's head). Draw on a ghost face!

Here's Avery posing with her ghost:

The finished handprint ghost!

She really got a kick out of this one. Lately she loves tracing her hands so we made 3 of these in no time. She colored in two of them and I did this one. We hung them on our front door and she loves them!

Boo!

There's one other thing we're doing to get into the spirit of things around here. It's called getting Boo-ed! I saw this idea on another blog and thought it sounded like so much fun!

You start by printing out a few copies of this. You put a copy into a bag of treats that you assemble. Then you deliver the treats anonymously to your neighbors without them knowing (basically a ding-dong ditch type of thing). They put the ghost sign up in their window so that others know they have been boo-ed and then they continue on the fun! The idea is to see how many houses can get boo-ed by Halloween.

I delivered the first bag back on Sunday hoping the neighbors would participate. I saw the sign go up on their door so I was hopeful. Unfortunately I haven't seen any other signs going up, so I don't know if they followed the instructions or if they did follow them and our other neighbors are party poopers. So, I put together 2 more bags to deliver tonight to see what happens.

These are just a few things we're doing here to get into the spirit of Halloween. Tell me, what are you doing to gear up for the holiday? I'd love to hear your ideas!

My Budding Artist

Avery and I officially did her first craft the other day! (Yes it's a spider!)

I saw it online somewhere but changed it a bit. You're supposed to use black paint and paint the child's hand to create the handprint...there was no way that was going to happen! So I just traced her hand with a pencil then went over it with a marker and colored it in. Ok so I confess that I did 99.5% of the work, but the child is obsessed with these! She wants to look at them constantly which is so cute!