More holiday cheer!

We were invited for dinner at the home of some new friends.  I thought it would be a fun activity for the kids if we decorated a gingerbread house...

Before we left home, we had to mix up the frosting and assemble the house.  George helped with the electric mixer:

Yum, frosting...

Here the kids waited patiently as I took a picture:

Then they brushed icing on the roof:

And decorated with lots of candy:

And our finished house:

George even helped by piping on the icing for the door.  I think if I would have given him the icing bag the whole dining room would have been covered.  Well, it was a good activity, the kids liked it, and I can't wait to do it again when George is older. 
Christmas is almost here.. are you squeezing in every last bit of holiday fun while you can?

30 is here, and it's really not all that bad....

I'm eating chocolate cake with PINK frosting.  yeah, i went a bit overboard with the red food coloring, but it's so much harder now that it comes in gel instead of liquid.  I had no idea how much I was adding..

The cake decorating did not go as I had planned.. i wanted a light pink base with little white flowers, but the flower tip was giving me trouble, so I ended up with little white peaks of loopy-ness.  I'm glad I'm not a professional or this totally would have ended up at cakewrecks..

George came with me in the morning to the grocery store for last minute cake-baking supplies, then he was going to help me mix the batter, but kept wanting to stick his fingers in it.  He succeeded in grabbing a handful of frosting right out of the tub, but that wasn't so bad once I taught him how to lick it off his fingers. We got my parents & sister on Skype so everyone could sing "happy birthday" together and that was really cool.  Costas bought me flowers and took me to a movie (YES, we actually got a babysitter and went out without George!)  After the babysitter texted that George was sleeping, we strolled around the mall and took purikura (for the first time in 8 years..).

A good day, definitely.  Now I'm debating between quilting a bit or just heading to bed.  Maybe I can applique just one circle on the new quilt I started...