Whacking together a Gingerbread house...under PRESSURE!

Well, its the season to be jolly...yeah right. So many things that need to be done, and so little time. I have to admit, I've been loving the Christmas season mostly, but since having children, I seem to set more tasks for myself to be accomplished pre-christsmas and it becomes a pressure in itself! This year I bought a Gingerbread house kit. Easy-peasy..have done them before. Love the look of them, love the assembling, and love the EATING of them..so whats the problem? The problem is, we have engagements in the morning, we have engagements in the evening, and the kids spotted the box at midday so once they got hold of that little bone they wouldn't leave it alone!! AARRGGHHH! Ok, so we washed our hands, got our stools, cleared the benches and opened the box. Oohh, whats this mum? Ahhh, whats that mum? Pieces were snatched out of my hands, out of the box before I knew what was happening. I will say at this point I did get a little hot under the collar. I couldn't have any pieces broken, chipped or bitten just yet. Now there isn't much to do with the kits, they are really kid-friendly. All the pieces are so easy to put together and the decorations are included. The only thing we needed to do was mix the "glue". Icing, eggwhite and lemon juice. We found a nice red plate to put the base on, then did th mix. I realised though that my piping bag had long before bitten the dust, so we had to improvise with a plastic bag...class act we are! It worked wonderfully. We filled up a little zip lock bag and cut off the corner and started filling in the holes to secure the two A-frames to the base. Then there was the two roof pieces, but before we secured them with more glue, we filled the house with chocolates (I know, I know, who needs more choccies, lollies or candy canes at this point, but its part of the tradition). Next step was to stick the fence lollies in, more glue, then we added the little people..more glue. Once we had it all together (really a matter of 15 - 20 minutes in all) we began trying to emulate snowy eves which was a little messy with my make-do piping bag. Although the end result looked more realistically like drooping snow, than a beautifully piped row of rosettes would have!! Well, thats what I decided anyway. Voila! A quick, fun, easy house was made. We admired our workmanship (it stayed together nicely), and checked the box to make sure we had done all we needed, and realised there was one last touch to authenticate our house, a little snow drift of icing sugar was needed. The lad decided this was his job, I turned away to start clearing up, and when I turned back, there was a veritable BLIZZARD happening on our house! I had to hold back the laughter, it still looked great, and he had such a good time doing it. The real effort was now to stop them breaking it all open to eat it immediately. Lucky for us we had a family picnic the next day, so we only had to wait 12 hours until we could share our house with family. All evening, they wandered in to the kitchen to have a little look at what they had made. They were so proud of it. They really loved doing it,but the house took longer to make than to break. It was demolished in minutes once we put it in front of the cousins. It was well worth the effort, and the kit I had cost me $12.99. Happy Christmas - I hope you are all having fun with your christmas baking too!