Thursday, March 17, 2011

Cookies and Crafts... with EIGHT boys...

The week of Christmas, I had all the six year old neighbor boys come over to decorate cookies and make some gifts for their parents. I figured keeping it to just the six year olds (and the twins of course), would be easy peasy. Um... well... what a nice illusion that was. It's not that it was hard, as much as it was loud and messy and a little chaotic at times. Sometimes I still forget that boys are very different than girls and don't sit still and quietly and neatly decorate cookies and do crafts. Boys and the words: sit, quiet and neat don't even belong in the same sentence.


The first thing they did was decorate gingerbread men and Christmas tree cookies. I have to tell you, I felt like the candy Grinch in his moment of epiphany. As I lined the table with bowls of chocolate chips - regular size AND mini, cinnamon candies, gum drops, M & Ms - regular size AND mini, snowcaps and green frosting, my anti-candy heart grew three sizes that day. Okay, really it raced and wondered what exactly I was thinking sitting large amounts of candies in front of eight young boys... and wondering just how many green smoothies I would need to feed my kids to flush it out of their systems.




In all the chaos that is boys, they all had a lot of fun decorating, comparing and most importantly eating the cookies. I made hot chocolate with marshmallows (the all natural, almost-not-even-worthy-of-the-marshmallow-name kind... hey, I had to draw the line somewhere, right?) for when they ate their cookies, which they loved.


Oliver decorating his gingerbread boy.


Collin doing the ONLY thing he wanted to do the entire time... eat the cookies.


Oliver's first finished cookie masterpiece.


Ethan's cookie... a robot. Another thing I forget, gingerbread men can't just be gingerbread men. Silly mommy.

Jayden's gingerbread man.


Andy's gingerbread man.


Jonathan's gingerbread man and Christmas tree.

Christopher's gingerbread man.


Aiden's gingerbread men.


After the cookies, I broke out a super cool fingerprint art book (Ed Emberley's Fingerprint Drawing Book) that I had found. They made their dads a fingerprint lion and their moms a notepad with different fingerprint art at the top of each page. It was fun to see the creativity and care that some of them used when making these. Well, not Ethan, he was done. He wanted to play (in all fairness, he also had his six year appt that morning and two shots, one being tetanus which I personally think hurts a lot and feels like you have a baseball in your arm... it was taking its toll). But the other kids... it was cute.

I think the afternoon was a success and everyone agreed that we needed to do it again next year. I think by then I will be ready to do that again... and we will have finally found (and cleaned up) all the candy that was somehow tossed about the first floor of the house during those few hours (seriously, how do boys manage that?!).



Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Remember us?

Hello family, friends,... blog world. Remember us? Themooressix?

We are still here, but one of us... me... is utterly and completely overwhelmed with increased work priorities and traveling, homework, housework, other commitments and this and that... basically just life but in overdrive. BUT, I am going to find a way to start posting again, after all I haven't even made it to Christmas 2010 yet in our family blog world/my only scrapbook of the kids {GUILT}.

And I miss it. I miss sharing the stories (and I have a lot!). I miss connecting with other mommy bloggers (I also haven't had time to read as many as I had). I am also concerned that the kids will look at the printed book of the blog (another dream of mine I have yet to do {more guilt}) someday, and will wonder what happened to entire months of 2010 and 2011 where I blipped off the face of the earth in blogging terms. Okay, I'm sure they will be fine... but still... where did those months go?! Can I have them back? *sigh*

Here's my random, almost-spring, day-before-St. Patrick's Day resolution (you know, since I clearly missed the New Year's resolution time frame)... I am going to blog at least once a week for the rest of the year... on this blog... about themooressix and their goings on... however exciting or boring it is (I really hope I find my groove again, even I can't stand to read my seriously boring posts!).

Okay. There is it. In writing. Documented.

Next up... Christmas holiday action 2010. :)
Blog Widget by LinkWithin