The Lee Family: Decorating Gingerbread Men

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Decorating Gingerbread Men

Yesterday after school I decided to take the girls to the Gaylord Texan so that we could decorate gingerbread men and see "Gingy" again this year. Sofia and I did this with her friends last year and it's one of her favorite memories. Over the past few weeks she's asked several times when we'll get to decorate gingerbread men, but as much as my friends and I have tried to plan a day that works for us all to meet at Gaylord Texan, we finally decided it probably won't work out this year.

Yesterday was rainy and grey and I figured it would be a fun thing to do together. Olivia and I picked Sofia up from school and I told her my plan, which she was very excited about. Once we pulled into the Gaylord, Sofia said "WOW, this is going to be the best!" We parked and made our way into the hotel and watched the trains for awhile. It's funny the difference a year makes - last year Sofia couldn't get enough of the trains. This year, she enjoyed watching them for about 10 minutes but was ready to move on. I always love the decorations at the Gaylord and it wasn't very busy, so we enjoyed walking around for a bit before heading over to the gingerbread decoration area.

We got our gingerbread family and started decorating. I added the frosting while Sofia added the candy. She was a bit of a minimalist when it came to decorating so we had a lot of candy left over and were done decorating pretty quickly. It was fun though and she was ready to make up stories of her new family...as well as eat them!

Once we finished decorating, we met Gingy, another Sofia favorite! She gave him a huge hug while Olivia clung to me not wanting to get too close to him. After, we visited the life-sized gingerbread house and gingerbread house competition area. Finally, as we were heading out we ended up walking near Santa in his huge arm chair. I was a little nervous that she'd ask why that Santa looks different than the one she met the week before. Instead, Sofia said "Look, it's Santa's helper." I asked her why he was Santa's helper and she said because we met "the real" Santa so this must be a helper who meets other kids at other places. Couldn't have explained it better myself! We headed out to meet CK for our weekly Mexican dinner at Christina's. It was such a fun afternoon!

Sofia and Olivia next to the nutcracker