The Dreidel Game...and gingerbread

After an entire month of advent calendars counting down until Christmas, the kids (Alexander, in particular) were excited to start counting the days of Hanukkah. As it happened, the first day of Hanukkah was on Christmas Day this year...but somehow we didn't get around to playing the dreidel game until today. We didn't get any gelt this year (although technically the kids got chocolate coins at both the live nativity we went to and in a Christmas gift from Jessica (their primary teacher), but they ate all of that) so we played with M&Ms instead. 

They were left over from our gingerbread houses...which I never did post about, did I? 

Guys! We made gingerbread houses! On December 19!

And, honestly, Phoebe ate so much candy it was concerning. She ate so much candy that her tummy hurt. When I suggested she could...stop eating candy...she simply batted her eyelashes at me and said, "No, fanks!"

I'm amazed any candy got on her house at all...but with the understanding that she'd get to eat whatever candy she put on her house at a later time, she agreed to put a few candies on it.

Here she is double-fisting some ginormous marshmallows:

Here she is hard at work:

Here she is giving me some smiles:

And here she is effectively marking her territory:

The other kids made houses as well (Rachel looks so impatient in this picture, but I assure you I just caught her mid-blink):

Here's an archway that Zoë made, that I thought was lovely:

Here's Alexander's finished house (I thought his teeter totter out front was a nice touch):

Here's Benjamin's with a glacier in the front, creeping toward his house:

Here's Phoebe's on the left with Andrew's on the right:

He made a tree in his yard from some very well-done gingerbread. Here's what happened: He was making gingerbread with the kids and was still busy cutting new shapes out when the timer went off so he asked me to take the cookies out of the oven. I did. And they looked great. But we had no counter space, so holding a hot pan in one hand, I scuttled around the kitchen trying to clear a space to put down the tray. And I did! I cleared a counter, got out a cooling rack, removed the cookies, did some more tidying up...and then Andrew came into the kitchen with some fresh trays of cookies.

"Two trays at once?" I asked him, when I saw him carrying two trays in the kitchen.

"That's what I did before," he said. 

"Uh-oh," I said.

We opened the oven door and just...those gingerbread were darker than dark. It was a sad/funny thing!

Anyway, here's my house next to Rachel's and...honestly I hope Miriam took a picture of her house!

She stayed at the table to work on her house longer than anyone else did, so I didn't get a picture of it on the back cabinet. But it turned out lovely as well!

*****

Given Phoebe's behaviour during gingerbread houses....

....we weren't sure how much self-restraint she'd have during the dreidel game, but we dealt her in anyway and she behaved remarkably well! She only ate one M&M during the game...and only after asking whether she could because it fell onto the floor and its candy shell cracked, revealing the chocolate center. That's grounds for eating a candy early, isn't it?

By the end of the game she knew all the letters on the dreidel and what they meant. She had a wonderful time playing!

Andrew and I definitely lost. He got out and then I got out right after. And then we stopped for bedtime.

Here you can see that Andrew and I each have only two M&Ms remaining...

The kids were making pictures with their M&Ms (you can see, for example, Benjamin's "Minecraft hammer" above) so Phoebe decided to make a picture, too.

When we asked her what it was, she said, "Ummmm...a banana peel?"

She's M&M rich! 

And she waited until the game was completely over to eat her loot!