6 Weeks of gingerbread, royal icing and lots of candy!!

Every Christmas for the past 5 or 6 years my little family and I have went to the Grove Park Inn to "oooooooh" and "aaaaaaaaah" over the beautiful gingerbread houses that are on display for the Annual National Gingerbread House Competition. Last year my 11 yr old decided that he wanted to enter a house into the competition. Which I'm all about encouraging my children to participate and try new things but this one I was a little worried about. You see every time we have ever tried to roll out cookie dough and cut different shapes with cookie cutters, the dough never quite co operated like we wanted it too. The dough would get too warm and mushy and when we would go to pick the shapes up off the counter top to place on the cookie sheet the cookies would loose their shape or just stick to the counter. But never the less we gave it a whirl. After leaving the gingerbread dough in the refrigerator for a while I rolled the dough out on my baking stones. That way all we had to do after cutting the shapes out was peel the excess dough off the stone and the house pieces would still be intact. This worked great. WooHoo!




He created a great little house with a lego candy dog house and snow man out in the front yard. He didn't win but he did receive a certificate of participation. Which I think he was quite proud of.
So time rolled around again this year for the competition and not only did my 11 yr old want to compete but also his sister. So this meant double the fun! Six weeks ago we began the journey of creating their masterpieces. I wanted to try a new gingerbread recipe this year. And we are glad we did. The consistency of the dough was much more firm and a lot easier to work with. And I believe the magic ingredient was vegetable shortening. It was amazing the difference. We were able to roll the dough out right after mixing it together without having to refrigerate it at all.
Over the next six weeks we all watched as their houses took shape and became pieces of artwork.
This is the beginning of my daughters house.


This is her finished piece. She named it "Sugar Land" (love it)


This is the beginning of my sons house.


This is his finished piece. He named it "Camp Wazoo!". It is a camp for boy and girl animals.

We made the daring delivery this past Sunday. This is always interesting. Last year I rode in the back of our Land Rover with the house display held between my feet. This year however there wasn't enough room for me to fit back there with both displays so they had to ride on their own. Thankfully they made it to the GPI without any mishaps.
We haven't found out if either of them won yet. We will make the trip back to the GPI to see if either of them have a ribbon pinned to their displays. It really is a fun adventure and perhaps one day I'll get up enough nerve to enter one myself.

Getting back on the horse.

After an extremely long break I am attempting the blogging world again. I wanted to share how our first year attempt at year round school has gone so far. After nine years of homeschooling following along with the public school schedule I decided why not try year round. So far it has went well. I haven't felt nearly as stressed and worried with "Oh no, we can't afford to take today off or we will never get in all 180 days for the school year before the end of June."

We started our year the first week of August. Then seven weeks later we took our first week long break. It worked out well. My sister was getting married so I was able to plan that we would take the whole week of her wedding off so that I, the matron of honor could do whatever I needed to do to tie up any loose ends with her wedding. The kids were very excited about having a whole week off and being able to play and do "fun" things. It was like a mini summer vacation.

My intentions were for us to continue on a weekly school schedule until the week of Thanksgiving and take that whole week off. Which would be eight weeks of school until then. But two weeks ago my 11 yr old came down with the flu. He missed the whole week of school. Then the following week he was still re cooperating so I made the school work load easy on him. I did however continue to teach my 14 yr old during this time. We are going to go ahead have school on Monday and Tuesday of the week of Thanksgiving and possibly on Wednesday too. We may just see how our week plays out. My thinking too is that we'll plan to take two weeks off for Christmas. Which this is what we usually take off at Christmas time. I had considered us taking a third week off then but two weeks is usually more than enough time for the kids to play with all their new toys.

We have also missed the occasional day off here or there throughout the year too. Because as all of you who home school know, life happens and some days school just doesn't get done. But with this schedule I do feel more relaxed. Also I am looking forward to schooling through the summer months for a couple of reasons. The main reason being that my children won't forget everything that they have learned this year and then us have to spend the first month and a half of the next school year relearning everything. Another reason being that every summer my children always enjoy a few weeks of playing and doing all the fun outdoors stuff but then the "Mom, I'm bored" sets in. And here in the mountains of NC our afternoons can be quite hot and muggy and not so fun to play outside in. So this is the perfect time for them to wonder inside and us sit down together and do some school work.

So to sum up our first few months of this school year. I'm digging the year round school!!