Christmas Gingerbread House

Here it is, the 2024 Christmas Gingerbread House!  I got home tonight and we plugged in some Christmas movies while we made ourselves this gingerbread house you see above, and below.

As always, Maddie picks one side of the house and I get the other, and then the two of us get busy working on getting the candy on.  Maddie got all the icing on the roof and then added dots to it.  I picked up some hard candy to use for windows and some Starlight mints to use as a fence around the house.  Anyway, it was fun making and it turned out pretty good!  And it tasted pretty good too - one of the fun parts of this process is eating lots of candy here and there throughout the construction!  This concludes our 2024 season of Gingerbread houses - here's the one we did for October, and here's the one we did for Valentine's Day.

So today was Tuesday, which you can see that Jingle Bell and Snowflake are pretty excited about.  It's a holiday tradition for these two to give out taco gummies on a Tuesday in December.  And of course she was eating tacos today.  Of course.  Maddie goes through our hot sauce rather quickly!

So today was a big day at KidPak, I think.  We had this huge meeting where we were mapping out potential curriculum choices for the year.  We had a lot of chefs in this one with a fairly complicated goal of mixing a chronological timeline through the Bible with the usual KidPak theming along with overall church events and so on. 

Ultimately, I'm not sure if the chronological way of telling things works, as is difficult to fit a theme like "Star Wars" or "Toy Story" into four consecutive stories from the Bible.  An example of this came up fairly quickly when we were discussing the Fruit of the Spirit, and trying to make that fit the story of the Tower of Babel.  It's possible, of course.  But time and again, we just found that it was more challenging and in fact, somewhat like forcing a square peg into a round hole.  Or whatever metaphor you want to use.

We'll get it figured out.  Whatever it is.  But it's been somewhat of an upending with the curriculum.  We spent the entire day with this today, and the end result is that I'm not sure what's going on in January at the moment.  Two weeks ago, I had a booklet and messages all lined up for January.  Now it's time to be flexible, so we'll see what happens.

Aw, look at this little guy we found in the garage.  I'm not sure why or how or any of it, but Mom gave him a mealworm, and we let him hang out in the warmth of our garage. 

We enjoyed our evening together, and that was great seeing Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol.  I just love the music in that one - we're often singing along with the characters in that cartoon.  We read tonight, and after that we said our prayers.  We had a good evening together!