Gingerbread House Decorating Party~ GONE AWRY!!!

Definition of Awry: away from the correct or expected course; wrong or distorted; not funtioning properly;  HAYWIRE. 

The kids and I decided to have a little holiday gingerbread house decorating party for their friends.  I looked online, downloaded and printed off these free and adorable party invitations.  Scrapbook Scrapbook was the awesome site I found them on.

The invitations even included cute gingerbread people envelopes.

This is what the inside looks like when it's opened up~

                      I cut out the MANY :) little pieces, and the kids had fun gluing them on.

We made little place cards for each of our guests~

                                                   We constructed the gingerbread houses~

We decorated and got everything ready for our guests~

 Can you see the tv screen towards the back?  Boise State was playing that day~ you can see the blue turf. :)

Yes, everything was great until...well, until our guests arrived...

I had imagined the whole party going down in a fun, yet controlled manner.  The party guests would come in and quietly enjoy watching Frosty the Snowman until all the other guests arrived. 

After that, Christmas music would play festively in the background... 

...while all the children creatively worked on their gingerbread houses.

NOPE.  Didn't happen like that. At all.

• Instantly all 5 boys started pillow fighting and rough housing. (Mine was the roudiest of all!) I could not get them to listen to me, and even the "turning off the lights to get everyone's attention" trick did not work!  (This worked on 22 first graders when I taught, but 5 boys in my home??? Not a chance.)
• The girls went into Zach's room and messed up his first-time-made-this-week bed.
• I forgot to make the frosting to stick the candy on with!  Oops!
• Zach's best buddy got a bloody mouth during an unauthorized snowball fight.
• Maya and one of her friends thought it would be fun to go back into Zach's room and pull wallpaper off his wall~

  (In all fairness, Zach had ripped off some of this wallpaper when he was younger, but did we really need more ugly here?) 

Seriously, the list really could be longer, but just thinking about it again gets me pooped!  These are normally good kids, people!!!

*If anyone reading this happens to be a parent of one of our party guests, I am not referring to your child.  It was all the other children, of course.

I must say, that all the hellions children, decorated their gingerbread houses beautifully~

Zach made an awesome firepit outside his house~

Here are the girls working so hard!  They all dressed up in Maya's princess gowns before decorating~

       
                                              This is how the boys looked, hard at work!

                                        Each party attendee got a certificate for their gingerbread house~

I was REALLY lacking in creativity at this point~ we had most adorable, prettiest, cutest, most frosting used???? (That's right, one kid really went home proud as can be because he got a certificate for using the most frosting, hee hee).

      (Yes, I did spell "firey" wrong, I think. Wait.  Is that even a word?  Can you misspell a non-word?)

You know it was a CRAZY party when all the guests are gone and yet there is an extra pair of unclaimed shoes left in the shoe pile.  Hmmmmm...  :)

Not so sure now about the Polar Express/Pajama/Hot Chocoloate Party the kids and I thought would be fun to host in a few weeks.  I think more recovery time will be necessary! :)