Gingerbread and lights

We decided to decorate our annual gingerbread house tonight. I made all of the gingerbread yesterday so we could focus on the decorating tonight. It started off well...

Making the royal icing with a little helper in his cowboy apron:

We got the gingerbread house all "glued" together and thought it was stable enough to start decorating. We were wrong... it collapsed. The royal icing was also giving us trouble-- somehow we got a hole in the piping bag and icing was everywhere!

I'll be honest, at this point I was ready to throw in the towel and just eat the candy. Sean was more optimistic and he engineered a way to make the house more stable. We used supports until the house dried just to be safe.

Jackson thought he was in heaven when he saw the big pile of candy in the middle of the table. We pretty much gave him free reign :) He seemed to have a lot of fun helping us decorate.

He also ate a lot of candy already on the house. I'm pretty sure I caught him red handed in this picture:

The finished product:

Nothing fancy, but this ended up being one of my favorites so far!

Not more than 30 minutes later, this was what was left of our gingerbread house:

Apparently some little boy was sneaking candy off of the finished product and the roof collapsed (I take full responsibility for leaving it within his reach-- doh!) I tried to put the roof back on and the whole thing fell! hahaha the only thing we could do at this point was laugh. Glad I snapped a picture before the apocalypse.

Moving on...

Every year we put up Christmas lights on our balcony. Not really sure why, but we started calling it our "fiesta." The time for the fiesta arrived and Jackson and Sean spent some quality time putting up the lights. It was freezing outside so I opted to stay inside and make cookies :)

Jackson thought the lights were quite amazing and he squealed each time Sean plugged in a new strand.

ooooohhhhh, aaaahhhhh

Good job boys!