OK, so I'm a little out of order in my blogs. Oh well. Nikki had her birthday on November 19th. She woke up and came downstairs bright and early to open presents. Doug decorated the house for her birthday while she was in bed so she came down to "birthday land." She opened her presents, went to school with the homemade Confetti Cookies to share with her class, and came home and had a dinner of Chicken Divan, which she specifically requested. She had a good day. Until she found out that I would be leaving for Michigan in the morning before she woke up and would be gone for an undetermined amount of time. But she survived with all the helping hands here in NJ - watching her after school while Doug was at work, and feeding my family dinners while I was gone.
Then on December 7, (coincidently her due date!) she finally had her friend party. We only invited 4 girls because we would be decorating elaborate gingerbread houses. We started with veggies and crackers (because I knew they'd be stuffing themselves with candy later) and cake because that would be easiest to move out of the way. Once the gingerbread decorating got underway, there was no stopping them or even a place to put the houses in order to eat cake! The six girls worked diligently and came up with some amazing scenes. Even though many had ponds, or sleds, or chimneys, or campfires, they all looked different. It was fun to see what these girls could come up with. Two of the moms stayed to help so we had 4 adults to 6 kids. If the girls were having trouble executing their design, we stepped in and did as they instructed. Otherwise, they did it on their own. We had out so many different candies to choose from, and cookies, crackers, pretzel sticks, cereal, marshmallows, spices, fruit rollups, and plastic dogs to use. (Nikki's party theme was dogs since that's all she wants for Christmas so we had dog plates, napkins, dogs on the cake, dog stickers and tattoos, and table cloth.) Since we were busy helping the kids or putting out more food to use, we didn't have much time for pictures. But here are a few that we managed to take...
I built the houses the night before from a kit and let them set overnight so they'd be ready to decorate! Instead of using the plastic trays as a base, we moved the houses to large pieces of foam board so that the girls would have room to create a yard.
Nikki's house - see the campfire on the front walk and the dog wanting to come inside?
Another pic of Nikki's house. We ran out of blue fruit rollups for water, so we dyed white icing blue to make a pond.
Caroline's house. See the duck gumdrops swimming in her lake? And the sand by her lake? She used a fruit rollup that unfortunately had "tongue tattoos" on them. I told the girls to wipe off the tattoos with a wet wipe, but they were all so anxious to decorate, they all opted to keep the Batman tattoos on their rollups!
Caroline's sweet-smelling Fruit Loop roof
Kendall's house with wafer bushes and a camfire.
Maura's house with a teddygraham jamboree by the campfire! Includes a pretzel fence around her pond (or pool?)
Gabriella's house with Santa trying to pop out of the chimney, a duck pond with Mama duck and her babies, and a dog sled pulling another Santa.
Natalie's house with a Necco wafer roof, and Santa skating on the pond.
A quick moment to eat healthy snacks before bringing out the cake.
Nikki checking out her candles that burn different color flames
The lemon cake with lemon frosting, circled with dogs, of course.
The dog theme
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