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?!).