Spooky Gingerbread House 2020

Here's this year's entry for a spooky gingerbread house, just in time for October.  This one turned out really well, one of our favorites and really great job by Madison.  She stepped up big time and was so creative tonight.

She was photo documenting the process with her phone along the way too!  This is the pumpkin she made using some of the material the gingerbread kit contained.  She was balling up the orange stuff and using it like clay, along with some of the beads and a little black bat for the mouth.  She was doing a lot of other things too, of course.  But I love the pumpkin.

Here's an early shot while we were still decorating.  We popped in a movie, "The Corpse Bride," as we sat there at the kitchen table, assembling this ghoulishly delightful gingerbread house.  Along the way, as always, we were munching a little too much on the sugary debris.

Madison decorated the tombstone here, and the trees were a joint effort, as I was laying down the black icing while she added the skulls and little white ghosts there.  This took a while - two movies, in fact.  Nana and Mommy were there on the couch, turning to look backward and check on our process.  

It came out well!  We were looking back on this blog for the past entries, and were surprised we've been doing this for so long.  Five years now, we've been making a gingerbread house in October as well.  It's a nice decoration for the kitchen area.  This is one of my favorites, not just because of the end product, but because of the fun we had making it.  There were some challenges with the icing, mainly because Mommy couldn't help this time - she was with Nana the whole time.  But it turned out well!

Speaking of "The Corpse Bride," Madison was playing that tune on the piano today, practicing that and other pieces as well.  She had a decent day today.  She had an algebra test, and she thinks she did pretty well with that.  

Meanwhile, we were dealing with Social Security and other hoops to jump through after Ba-Ba's passing.  It's been a journey, and we just have to take things one step at a time.  I was also doing work today, finishing up "Trailblazers" at KidPak with Pastor Lance for some filming.  And we're doing other work as well towards our next three series, as we're pretty much lined up for the last of the year.  

We sat together to watch "Men in Black 3" tonight, and this was the first time for Madison, who thought it had a sweet ending.  It was a fun movie, and the end of the series that she's been watching lately.  She's enjoyed it.

We're almost at the end of "The Wizard of Oz" as well, and we just read another chapter that we're glad they decided to cut from the movie.  Apparently on Dorothy's way out of Oz, they go into a forest with a giant spider, one that eats all the friendly creatures of the woods there.  So the Cowardly Lion proves his courage by quickly finding that spider, and while it is sleeping, he slices its head off.  Yeah, that's in the book too.  There's a lot in the book that we're kind of glad didn't make it into the musical!

We prayed tonight, and slept rather soundly.  Nana was good in the morning, but went through a bit of trouble in the afternoon.  Fortunately, she was able to calm down with a little help from Mommy, and by the time we were making the gingerbread house and watching movies, she was more relaxed.  But she was completely forgetting so much, like the funeral of Ba-Ba itself, or where she even lived before this week.  We have a lot to pray about, of course.  The President and First Lady are sick with this virus, and it seems like the year 2020 still has a lot of negativity to offer.  But I'm still holding out hope that this year will offer something wonderful.  Just a few months left of this year, so hopefully that good news will speed things up a little!