The architects of our own something: a gingerbread bus journey

Last Christmas (I gave you my heart)...

Ha. No. Although I do have a deep and abiding love of Wham!

Last year, Target had some Marks & Spencer items for sale before Christmas.

Ooh! A gingerbread London bus. Look how charming!

The kids and I were all excited. We were going to the UK for Christmas, and ooh, we were going to make an adorable gingerbread bus!

I was excited: something the kids and I could do together. A cute little family project.  

And of course it was going to look just like the picture. We had everything we needed!

The kit had the pieces, and then lumps of colored fondant that you had to roll out and make fit. But, like, you also had to cut the holes out of them for the windows and such.

Do you know how hard it is to roll out fondant and cut it into gingerbread-bus sized pieces?

In case you don't know, I will tell you: very.

It breaks. It's hard to know how much to put on one side and have enough left over for another.

We just cut it into pieces and figured we could smoosh them all smoothly together.

Which. Well. You see.

And then! Then we had to use icing to stick it all together!

It did not stick together.

Nick got involved. He's excellent at carpentry and fixing things. I had high hopes.

He used icing. And more icing. It didn't work.

So then he used glue. It may have been wood glue.

At first I was horrified. But then I realized that each and every piece of gingerbread and icing had been so manhandled, there was no way we were going to eat it.

We just wanted something to show for our many hours of effort.

He set it carefully, and we left it on the counter to dry overnight.

We're just not Christmas bus people.