Gingerbread disaster

The local Children's Museum was doing a gingerbread house making workshop today, for $18 per house. I considered the fact that I could probably make houses for each of us for that amount of money, but I then decided it would be worth the extra money to have someone else clean up the mess afterwards and that it would be nice to do something as a family, away from home and distractions and the phone etc.

Boy was I wrong. Remind me, please next year, to stay completely away from the museum and to make our houses at home. What a bad experience it turned out to be.

Firstly, we got to our table and were shown a cardboard house, instead of a gingerbread one! There was no gingerbread in sight. I was very disappointed.


So we decided to go ahead and decorate our cardboard house with icing and candy labeled as "recycled - do not eat", in other words, it's probably been swept off the floor, some kid might have had it up their nostril before etc etc


Explaining to Lana that she can't eat it wasn't easy.


Nevertheless, let's get on and make our house.




Zoe started crying her eyes out and screaming the place down cause she was hungry.




So I sat and fed her. This lady at our table seemed rather put off at a baby being breastfed in the corner, and continued to throw dirty looks in my direction. I really thought she was about to get up and say something. It's not like anything was on display. Heck I'd have thought they'd be happy that there was no screaming baby anymore.


Lana decided not to bother with the whole not eating it thing.

And we quickly discovered that the red icing stains!

But we thought, what the heck, let's close our eyes and try to cope with the mess. We'll clean up the kids afterwards, lets just have fun and enjoy it.

Looking around us, every other kid was sitting quietly, having fun making pretty white houses with perfectly decorated patterns of candy. They all had perfect clean clothes on and not a spot of icing on them. Our section was completely covered with mess, our kids were wiggling and spilling and yelling and our wee house looked in a poor state of existence.

But then Kaya's controlling, perfectionist nature started to get the better of her. She became rather angry that Lana wanted to stick a lolly pop 2 inches to the right of where Kaya wanted Lana's lolly pop to go. And she proceeded to remove Lana's lolly and move it. We of course put it back and warned Kaya that she has to work as a team and let Lana make contributions to the project too.

She just picked up that lolly again and tried to put it back, which made Lana start crying. Kaya threw a bit of a fit and started chucking things around, fighting with my hands and slammed her messy red icing hands down on the leather jacket of the lady who had been staring at me breastfeeding earlier. Needless to say the lady didn't look pleased. Her jacket, thankfully, was fine. but the lady looked like she was about to start a fight with me.

I told Kaya she was done, and started to drag her, kicking and screaming out of this overcrowded little workshop. Which was no easy task. I was red and hot in the face, and I could sense, without looking up, that every eye in the place was on Kaya and I, while we made our way, inch by inch out of the room.

Then out in the hallway she screamed and cried as loud as she could and yelled in front of everyone that she hated her family and wished I wasn't her mother. She wished she could be adopted. Everyone there seemed to think this was fantastic entertainment, like watching sports or something. We were quite the stars of the show, Kaya and I. I sat her down and we had a long talk and she eventually calmed down and we left.

And I don't feel right now like I ever want to step foot in the place again.

Ah the joys of raising kids.

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