This afternoon Josie and I hosted a playdate for making some mini-gingerbread houses. This is the first time I’ve ever done this from scratch. I made the gingerbread and the royal icing, and I guess not from scratch the box and the candy 🙂 We did the gingerbread yesterday and made it to fit around a pint sized cream container so it would be steady for preschoolers to work with it instead of frustrating.

All in all I think it went well for the 3 year olds, the biggest challenge was keeping  them from eating the candy. Celia tried a little, but she just wanted to lick the candy. I kept showing her how to put it on, and she’d put it on and then pull it back off. I eventually cobbled something together ‘with her’.

Josie on the other hand made a house after her mother’s own heart and covered it mostly with chocolate. She insisted on unwrapping all the kisses too, rather than let their pretty foil decorate the thing. She loves to unwrap. I had her unwrap all the rest of the candy while I made lunch and dinner and she couldn’t get enough of it.

Celia made a big mess.

It was so great taking a picture of something standing still, look how crystal clear it is! And Josie was not in a mood for pictures today, so this is her yesterday in front of the tree.

This year I wanted to try to impart more of the giving spirit onto Josie as I thought she might be able to understand more. So we gave Josie a set of three charities to pick from, Toys for Tots, Arlington Food Pantry, and Nursing Mothers Council. All worthy choices that might strike a chord with her. As I could have predicted, the toy one (Toys for Tots) won out quickly, she didn’t need to spend much time considering it at all. So I handily plopped her down on my lap to shop at Amazon and instructed her to find a toy that she would like to play with so we can give it to someone else. She picked out a fire chief costume.

She hemmed and hawed over why we would give it away, when we didn’t already have one of them while we waited for it. But it arrived and although she wanted to play with it she seemed to understand when I said we had to keep it ‘new’. We walked over to the donation bin and she dropped it right inside. She only wishes that she could get a note or see the ‘little girl when she opens it’.

I’ve been involving her more in our donations too, talking about how we’re giving away some of our stuff because we have so much and we can’t use it all. So we’re giving away our extra stuff to Goodwill. Nothing to do with the fact that our basement is stuffed to the gills! 🙂

No we didn’t go with that one.

This fall we went with a new gymnastics class for a few reasons. Her old one was a lot of time spent waiting for a turn and the teacher calling the non-cooperative kids back to class. Josie loved it, but one of the reasons she loved it was because of her friend Jordan who was also in the class. Jordan was 5 and so starting this fall she went to school and couldn’t do a Tuesday morning class anymore. Josie’s teacher also told me that she’s pretty talented and should take ‘real’ gymnastics classes. So off we went to a real gymnastics studio, but no big surprise, ‘real’ gymnastics aren’t that real at age 3, but they sure do cost more money. We did one 10 week session and Josie enjoyed it, Celia tolerated having to play in the background, but we’re done with it for now. We may go back to the other class and do both the baby and the big kid class so both of them can have fun in the new year.

They did a good job of keeping the kids active by moving them in a circuit, but there wasn’t much teaching or learning going on per say, just more ‘ok walk here and jump here’. A little bit of gymnastics skills with walking on the beam or hanging from a bar, but I was surprised at the lack of instruction. Perhaps the kids are just too little, this isn’t Russia or China screening for olympians. But the class was almost 20 minutes drive away (celia hates the car still) and overlapped with Celia’s preferred nap. So bye bye  to that class, but she had fun. We got to take some pictures in the last session, but it was too dark in there to do anything great.

In the last class they had each kid run a circuit independently while the parents sat in and watched. My mom came to help with Celia, ended up sitting with her sleeping in the car the entire time. Josie ran through her circuit without stopping and flipped over at the bar instead of just hanging from it (landed on her feet just fine) and then tackled her teacher. Guess the audience made her a little nervous.