Gingerbread

Every year, for the past three years, we have decorated a gingerbread house. It's part of our Christmas tradition. The way we do it, however, is uniquely ours. There are no graham cracker walls. There is no baking involved at all. We go to the San Antonio Children's Museum and they do most of the grunt work for us. In fact, the hardest part is finding a place to park!

At the museum, we pick up our gingerbread house (which smells yummy and is structurally sound) and a bag of various candies. On the tables are squeeze bottles of thick vanilla icing and great piles of paper towels. We glue the candies with icing and The Kid is totally in charge. This makes for some rather unorthodox choices. This year, The Kid spent most of his time working on the landscaping of the house, so the yard features a drenched-in-icing hedgerow and several unusually shaped gumdrop trees.

After we were completely covered in icing (I cannot seem to do this without getting icing in my hair) we go upstairs and goof around in the Children's Museum until we're tired and ready to go home. Yesterday's exciting jaunt featured a ride in the kid-powered elevator (which has been out of order every other time we've visited the museum), The Kid encasing himself in a gigantic bubble and beating his Dad at a game of kid-sized chess. We had a blast.