Sugar and Spice

Okay. Mostly sugar. It was just a sugar-filled weekend. That's okay. 

Friday night we celebrated our Family Movie Night with Home Alone. We had cheese pizza and ice cream sundaes to make it extra special. Now, obviously, my kids get ice cream sometimes. (And yes, I know two days in a row was a lot. But I think the last time they had it was at Disney World so I swear we aren't that crazy!) 

We rarely do an ice cream sundae bar though. And that's what we did for Home Alone. 

I got everything except butterscotch. Nothing against butterscotch but it's very similar to caramel and I had to draw the line somewhere. 

Anyway, it was fun. We had a good time. And even though I missed the tuck-ins that night because of going to my show... 

It was still a super low-key night which is what I needed. 

Saturday brought gingerbread 2022. And it was good. We got a late start because we (Husband and I) were so wiped from our busy week. But even still. We made 3 batches of gingerbread to make our 3 houses, we did have a bit left over but 3 batches would have been necessary no matter what. 

Amazingly, we only had to make 2 batches of icing. Brown and white! Which was awesome. It was weird because we were so tired, it was maybe the most phoning it in year of we've ever had. While I did send Husband to the store for a few tools as I made dough, but besides cotton candy, which we HAVE to buy annually because that stuff doesn't keep, we didn't buy any candy. We did buy a few kinds of sprinkles and then only used one set and stuff we already have. 

Next year I have instructed Husband to make me go back and read all the Gingerbread blog posts in mid-November so I can remember all the tips I've written to myself over the last 10 years. (It was our 11th house, but I wasn't blogging that first year.) We still didn't buy a sprinkles or food coloring tub. Which we need to do. 

I also need to buy more of the brown gel food coloring. And piping bags. Thanks blog for being my annual shopping list. 

Enough of that, want to see the houses? We all picked houses in specific color schemes this year. I kind of love it, they're very classy. 

C's house is browns, reds and white. (There is a purple pool for the hippo, because of course.) 

M went with a purple and gold theme. It did not help the Vikings yesterday though. 

The grown-ups went with a classic gingerbread and white house. I did make red hard candy windows, but I didn't add enough food coloring apparently so they're really more pink.

These are the nice pictures we take on Sunday morning. Here is the "it's super late and we need to go to sleep version." 

Because it was darker, you can see how the lights look in the windows a little better. Weirdly, this house was more stressful to me than most because I had a specific idea of what I was hoping for and then I just looked at a bunch of pieces of gingerbread and sprinkles and moved things all around. 

That's what we did over the weekend!