Fervor

I have wrestled control of the blog, however dear readers, have no fear no more cynical, anti holiday posts. (so reads the fine print of my agreement with Jenn for use of this space)

The Oak Park Moms & Tots has another group, Pops & Tots and as you may have guessed, despite the deceptive name, the group tries to get local Dads and their children out for various activities. Despite the best efforts of the main organizer this spring / summer the group activities fizzled. A comment that was overwhelmingly made by the Dads is that a traditional nursery school circle time with songs and books was not what we were looking for. I like the age when games and group play start to be a larger factor, like with E's beavers and soccer.

Anyway, Jenn and I were talking about how to get more Dads out (including myself) I remembered doing Gingerbread houses in Loblaws and thought a gingerbread house making workshop would be fun. Jenn liked the idea so we decided to go for it. At this point, I must admit that 'we' really involved Jenn baking individual pieces of gingerbread houses for 4 hours yesterday and getting up this morning to put icing into pastry bags. My contribution limited to keeping K out of the kitchen yesterday, picking up supplies (including Starbucks) for the Dads and posing as a gingerbread quality control agent.

So there we were this morning, walking into a room filled with potential, the children eyeing the Royal icing, decorations including: smarties, licorice, nibs, skittles, swedish berries, candy canes, -most of which donated by friends who own a local theatre.


Jenn did an intro to gingerbread building 101 and showed the example of what heights you can achieve. She did neglect to mention to the room, (i) Jenn is a professional, (ii) she may have 'vetoed' any creative input from K on her prototype, relying instead on the 'you can put that there, exactly there, and no where else but there' method.



That being said, her prototype looks fantastic. In all honesty, her prototype was used for advertising for the event and will hopefully be auctioned off as a fundraiser for the group later this month!

After a brief introduction and Royal icing lesson we were on our way. It was a lot of fun! We did the full build this morning and had to not only decorate the houses but construct them from the pieces.

Considering that Royal icing is essentially, sugar and the decorations were well...sugar laced and our helpers were all under the age of 5, I think that the morning went really well. We even learned about other uses for the juice boxes - to prop up the sides while the sides hardened, which takes about 3-5 minutes, but for the children would have seemed like hours and akin to watching ice melt! They were all super well behaved, had some fantastic creations and all ended up wearing at least some of the Royal icing. Check out K's final product, and tonight she (and the rest of us) enjoyed tearing it up and eating all the candies.

The event was a lot of fun and it was nice to get out and keep meeting people in the area and at the same point having fun with other Dads!

Thank you Jenn!