We had a truly amazing Sunday morning meeting this morning. After meeting, Kelly cooked up some foo-foo scrambled eggs with fancy mushrooms and smelly, old cheese. I am not admitting it to anyone, but it was really pretty good. Then the kids went back to work on their gingerbread house project. It looks to be somewhat more complicated than I would have expected. Lots of design work and planning, lots of intricate little pieces, lots of process steps, AND it has to taste good, too. It really did look like a good time doing the thing. I have to admit I was very skeptical, but the stencils worked great and the little pieces, which I thought were impossible were a little bit tedious, but came together just fine. After they finished their intricate English Country Home, the kids made enough walls and roofs for Mom to do her own little cottage on the side.
The bottom picture is of Kelly cutting out the windows and door for the front wall of the house. The little pieces of white paper at the bottom of the image are stencil pieces for the parts that make up the dormer and window shutters and other assorted “gingerbread” for the house. They even made some long slivers of gingerbread to fill in cracks. After this, Kelly made caramel to serve as glue to put the pieces altogether. They are so involved in the process, I don’t want to break their concentration to ask about the different colors they want to put on the house. I assume it will be frosting, but I guess I will just have to wait and see.
Kelly co-opted Christian in her big gingerbread house project yesterday and it brought back all kinds of good memories. Christian cannot help himself when it comes to this kind of thing. Christian wants the most artistically creative design possible, but adequate actualization of the design is not really possible without proper attention to even the most minute of details. Kiwi cannot help herself either. She is a people cat. Very social. A warm keyboard with people around is as good as it gets. This is precisely how Christian spent his college years–sitting at the bar with Rubix (Kiwi is the surviving twin cat sister and has filled in nicely now that Rubix is gone) laying on his arms or on the keyboard while Lorena and Kelly are cooking something in the kitchen. That purple and orange thing behind the computer is the bluetooth speaker with traditional Christmas music providing a nice background.
Christian worked on this quite a long time. The stencils for the design, based on Kelly’s absolute requirement to make an English manor, are now ready for the cooking of the gingerbread which should happen sometime starting this afternoon. Some of the pieces are pretty small, so we will have to see how it goes–improvisation and Engineering Change Orders might be necessary depending on suitability of the materials and implementation methods to the design. All good engineers can improvise when needed. Here is a closeup of the design below. Some of Christian’s notebooks (this is typical) are pretty amazing. They are a lot more cryptic these days as he is doing things in the bowels of theoretical Information Theory that is beyond our understanding. It is nice to see this throwback to some of his earlier work in homeschool and his undergraduate degree.