Valentine's Day Gingerbread House 2024

 

Here's our third entry in the Valentine's Day Gingerbread House series, and it turned out pretty good!  Maddie and I ended the fast in glorious fashion by making a gingerbread house to celebrate Valentine's Day, which of course meant conversation hearts and heart-shaped candies, plus those heart lollipops too.  

The roof is made from Frankenberry, continuing our trend of using Monster Cereal in our gingerbread houses, the only one not used so far is ironically Count Chocula.  But we've used Booberry before and recently Carmella Creeper.

This format was pretty good, the curving roof a rather unique "slant" on the typical gingerbread house.  It is a Mickey Mouse gingerbread, which you can see the evidence of in teh picture below at center with the peppermint and the two red ears.

We had this one left over from Christmas, so we saved it for Valentine's Day and it came out well.  We spent a few hours on this one, watching "Gnomeo and Juliet" while doing our decorations.  

We did not go to KidPak today.  We did watch the online service, which was a lot of fun.  And we watched the main church service as well, so we caught both services online, and that was well and good.  Again, we stayed home because of my condition.  I'm not well:  respiratory stuff.

Mom had a great meal for us this morning, a skillet breakfast with my first meat in twenty-one days:  bacon.  It was a fantastic and delicious breakfast!  We finished up our LEGO Jurassic World after that, finally achieving 100%.  Maddie was quite pleased with this.  The last one achievement was just taking one photograph near the Indominus Rex paddock.    There were hundreds of achievements though, and it took us a little while to get to this point.  

Tonight's feature movie was the final Ant-Man movie, which we all enjoy very much.  It's a good flick, and a great conclusion to the Ant-Man series.  We got this one for Christmas, one of about three movies we got on Blu-Ray.  The amount of physical copies of movies keeps decreasing every year.  I don't know if it's because we're getting older or it's because there aren't that many movies worth getting anymore.  Everything seems to be guiding folks towards streaming services and so on.  We do like this one though.  The conventional wisdom was this feeling that Kang the Conqueror should not be so easily defeated, but watching this again you can see he was not defeated by just Ant-Man, but in fact an army of ants from a class two civilization up against one super bad guy also with super technology, but these ants are just as strong, and are numerous and are simply held at bay by a force shield until a betrayal by a yet another super powered bad guy, which disables Kang's technology, plus an unexpected sucker punch attack from the Wasp, who shoots projectiles... it's not like Ant-Man defeated this one Kang on his own.  He had pride in his own army and that kept him from stepping in earlier, and in the end without all his technology, he was just one human being.  I think the big win made sense.  Even more, the movie makes sense as a part three of a trilogy focusing on Ant-Man and his immediate family.  This movie had heart, and seeing Hank Pym standing triumphant with all those ants rushing by to save the day was pretty awesome.  The story is great, and we can't wait to see some of these characters in a few weeks on the Disney Wish.

Anyway, it's late.  Tonight we did read some more, and after that we said our prayers.  It was a good day, despite the illness.  And despite this relentless bluebird.  These bluebirds are nice and all, but some of them are astoundingly unintelligent.  They have this crazy attack mode when they see their own reflection, and it's bonkers.  They never learn either.  They just sit there, wasting their entire day, attacking their own reflection over and over again in windows, passenger mirrors on cars, or any reflective service around.  There's never a point where they go, "Hey.  This is a flat surface and not another bird."  This thought never occurs to them, and so therefore, they'll literally spend the entire day striking out at that window or mirror, unless of course they are chased away.  Which frustrated house owners do, of course.  But the thing is, after a few moments, the bluebird comes right back and continues where it left off.  It's so frustrating, because you want to be kind and helpful one moment and the next you want to get the bug-a-salt weapon out and nail that dumb bird!  

Moving on, it's late.  I'm clearly on some NyQuil here because I'm fading.  It's time for all of us to get some sleep.  It's been a good day, despite the illness.