Making, Baking & Decorating

Our weeks leading up to Christmas have been full of fun crafts, candy making and decorating. I love that all their friends are on holiday break from preschool...it's helped us fill up these 10 straight rainy days with activities.

We had another gingerbread decorating day at our friend Lucia's house. Lucia's mom, Timmie, and I had planned this one back at the beginning of the month and I found these houses on sale. Since the kids had just decorated the little houses a few days before, they were like old pros. Cameron knew exactly what to do with the icing and Timo went straight to work on his roof masterpiece.

All done!

The next day we made candies for the Christmas goody plates that we pass out to our neighbors. These are the white chocolate haystacks...white chocolate, pretzels and raisins. I think they did a pretty good job of dropping out little "haystacks".
And of course...Timo did a pretty job of tasting it too!
Then we got to hang out with our best buddy, Jasper. We decided to make chocolate candies to add to our Christmas plate of goodies. My mom had brought a bunch of chocolate molds, paint brushes and colored chocolates in hopes of doing this with the kids but time went by too quickly...so she left it all for us to do, Thanks Granny! It was the perfect activity for them. I melted the chocolate and all they had to do was "paint" it in the molds, creating beautifully decorated Christmas candies!


Like all the other times, we tried to get the kids to hold off on the eating until all the work was done. They couldn't wait to eat one of the chocolate lollipops...the taste of sweet success!
Our final rainy day projects were reindeer and Christmas ornaments. I got the reindeer idea from my cousin Lauren...she did it with her kids and I thought it was so cute. It's a great way to mark the kid's growth over the years using their hands and feet!
The ornaments weren't anything special, just paper, stars stickers and a pipe cleaner. Cameron knocked out two ornaments during the time it took Timo to make one because he went through all the stars and picked out just the red and green ones. It was perfection in his eyes...and mine too!

Whew! How busy we have been and it's not even Christmas yet! I love this time of year because of all the little projects for the kids to do. I might have to get creative and drag some of them out into the next year...like gingerbread white houses for Presidents Day!