This is our gingerbread house.
http://yesi.am/...
True, it looks like crap. It didn't look great when we made it. And it looks worse now.
Construction was catch as catch can. The roof on one side started to slip, so I jacked that side up with another piece of gingerbread. Then the wall on one side started to slip so I used a gingerbread giraffe to prop it up. Then the front wall was peeling away so I tacked it back up with some lollipops, sort of like star irons in pre-Civil War era warehouses.
Still, it stood. My son was satisfied. We had been to the gingerbread house competition at his school, a Waldorf Rudolf Stiener school in upstate New York, and those people make some serious houses. There was a windmill, a crazy purple castle, a lovely cottage on a hill with a garden, a tower with a stone wall... one after the other, more incredible than the next. I was impressed enough with the pumpkin carving competition but this was just outstanding.
Ours was more of a third world shanty kind of gingerbread house. Maybe not serious third world, like some provincial city in Congo where you'd be lucky to find a piece of metal to make a roof, more like third world upper grade, like in Cape Town where some crazy guy could find all sorts of interesting things to glue on there. It's a third world shanty in an up and coming area with an original, creative owner with too much time on his hands. That's what ours was. With pre-Civil War era star lollipop star irons.
Then it was sitting on the cabinet in the hallway when some critter took a big bite out of the roof. Suspicion turned to the dog. Last year he had made a dare-devil leap from the sofa to the dresser and managed to eat enormous amounts of chocolate. We looked online to see what to do about a dog that ate chocolate and ended up making him drink hydrogen peroxide to make him throw it up. We didn't see him throw it up, so we did it again, then took him for a walk. Still no throw up. One more spoon... then we found that he had thrown it all up in our bed right on my pillow.
Anyway, we really thought we had taken proper precautions this year. No leaping chances, no climbing and he's not that big -- only 10 pounds. No way could he get it up on the hallway cabinet.
Okay, then mice. We have mice. We actually have two varieties right now. The field mice, light brown and white with very long tails, find the trap in the silverware drawer and die and the standard issue house mice get into the trap under the sink and die. Two dead mice every morning, so we have them. We also have cats but they are worse than the mice when it comes to stealing food, so they go back in the barn where they belong.
But why would mice start eating the gingerbread house from the top? Did one mouse stop the others as they made for the icing at the foundation and say:
"Fellas, stop right there. If you guys start eating from the bottom, the whole thing will collapse. See how this giraffe is holding up one side? This is not good construction. Let's get a ladder and start from the top."
Not too likely. More likely the critter leaned over and took at bite out of the roof because that was the easiest way to get a nice big bite.
Which sort of implies that the critter is bigger than the gingerbread house. Rats? No, rats would probably approach the situation much as would mice. And we haven't seen any rat pooped. Or smelled them. And I thought that mice and rats do not coexist in the same house (which is why I find the presence of the mice comforting).
A weasel, an opossum? How did they get in the kitchen? A raccoon? No, a raccoon would have eaten the whole thing.
Well, since I didn't know what happened I left a large piece of rat poison on the kitchen floor at night and locked the dog away, kids all upstairs. In the morning it was gone. The critter took it home to his kin folk.
Still, I wasn't really that interested in eating the rest of the gingerbread house, so I found a large pack of dogs and gave it to them. Here's the video:
http://glencadiadogcamp.com/...
The end.