Gingerbread Pineapples and Castles

I love my wife.

It has been a little over a year now that we have been blessed enough that Valerie has been able to stay home as a full time mom. This has been a huge help to our family as when Benjamin was born, within a few weeks Valerie was back working the night shift as a 911 operator and we were each swapping kids off as we briefly passed each other as one of us was either going to or coming from work. When Benjamin was a baby, this was very difficult. Now that we have Zachary too, I can scarcely imagine us doing this again.

As a stay-at-home-mom Valerie has occasional bouts of insanity… er, I mean creativity. Valerie can, now and then, decide to get totally crafty as evidenced by the lovely display of handmade stockings below. Also, you all know that her vinyl weeding skills are mad and she was on the cutting edge of scrapbooking before it was cool many years ago.

Enter gingerbread houses.

On Saturday morning with the local media blaring about the impending natural disaster that is “Winter Storm ‘08” and the two older kids off doing a community service project with the City of Fife, Valerie asked me to venture out of the house to buy some gingerbread house kits for Benjamin and our niece who is visiting, Tara to make while we waited at home for the snow to hit.



Word on the street was that there were some cute little house kits to be bought at Walgreen’s for the kids to make and they were inexpensive to boot. Off to Walgreen’s I went where after a quick scan of the shelves and a chat with one of the managers learned that they were sold out. That manager instead referred me to the bakery department at QFC where she had seen some kits for sale.

I just wanted a basic gingerbread house but when I got to QFC, I learned that apparently the plain old gingerbread house was no longer en vogue. All I could find were a selection of either Spongebob Squarepants’ pineapple under the sea in gingerbread…
…or a neon pink castle where all of the Disney princesses who have now apparently separated from their prince husbands now all live together to split the rent and utilities and share their memories of broken dreams and love gone wrong.
Since we had both a boy and girl building these, we opted to go with one of each.

Once I got these things home, I cleared out of the way and let Valerie and the kids have at it.

Spongebob’s place came first as Valerie and the kids stacked sections of gingerbread that formed the basic shape of the pineapple. It really looked more like a beehive than anything else until Valerie got it well covered in yellow goo just like a real pineapple.

Spongebob apparently isn’t very big since the whole pineapple itself was only about six inches high once it was all put together.

Still though Benjamin loved it and had a good time sticking candy to it licking his fingers while eating about as much candy as actually made it onto the house. He especially liked the gummi Spongebob and Patrick that came with the kit and displayed them both prominently in his seascape.

Patrick was bound to the roof of the house with a licorice rope and looked as though he had run afoul of Spongebob’s bad temper.

The candy looked as though it were sprayed at the house like buckshot but Benjamin was very proud of what he had done.

Here is what was expected per the plans…


…and here is what we ended up with…

Nice!

Next came the princess castle.


This one had some structural issues from the get-go. Apparently in gingerbread princess land, walls are held together with the paint that you use on your house.

Unfortunately though, this castle was being put together in a world where things such as the laws of physics apply and things were not going together well at all. Move the castle and the castle would collapse. Breath on the castle and the castle would collapse. Look cross-eyed at the castle and the castle would collapse.



Tara still had a good time sticking stuff to the ruins though I believe although she was slightly dismayed with the low construction standards.

Here is what the castle should have looked like…

…and here is what we got…

Super!

So now we have a little gingerbread neighborhood set up on the kitchen counter where the broken princess dreams live next door to the Spongebob while a little more candy vanishes every few hours.

I’m secretly hoping that if I move them near the edge of the counter the dog will make off with the both of them.