relenting: the house that love built

I'm relenting, since holding out does me no good.

My friend Amy sent a spy to my house this morning to covertly take pictures of my gingerbread house.  If it's coming down to spying, I may as well just post the pictures on my blog.  Plus, certain maternal figures in my family are bugging me to see the pictures too... =)

So anyway, here goes - the proof that I am not martha and will never be:

Problem #1 - the house was too big.

Problem #2 - I needed a serious stash of icing. Even after bumming some powdered sugar off my house helper, I still didn't have enough. So we only iced the roof.

Problem #3 - I didn't want to use egg whites (since samantha is allergic to egg), so I just used powdered sugar with a little water. (I wasn't sure when we were going to eat it, and I was afraid the milk would go bad before then). You can see in the picture below, this was not icing that was meant to glue hard candies to gingerbread. It was literally creating icicles before our eyes! We couldn't get anything to stay on!!

But Emma enjoyed patterning, finding the red and green candies to use as tiles for the house. She also specifically picked out these shell marshmallow-things at the candy store, and she thought they'd be perfect on top of the house. Sounds good to me...

Mantha, on the other hand, just wanted to try some of everything on her side!  (Plus, josh was supervising her side, so she REALLY had free reign!)  She did wan to contribute to the shell-ness on the top of the house.
After a while, we coaxed the icing to stay put, and once it dried everything did actually stay.  Before bed, the girls took pictures with their side of the roof...

Emma wanted her name written on there, as well as new baby's name (but we blurred it out:  Did you think we were going to tell you so soon??  =)  She was proud...

Mantha was also proud of her work of art, even though it looks rather like she just threw up the candy shop.  Anyway, she also might have been so happy because she got to sit on top of the table for such a long period of time.  

One of samantha's special candies she chose was green frogs.  So this house has been plagued by an infestation of frogs...as if it didn't have enough problems... =)

Both girls with the big huge house:
Even daddy contributed, writing our asianese family name on the front - truly, the house that love built!  And five little hearts, representing all five of the hearts in our home!