The Gingerbread House Fiasco

Mum bought a Gingerbread house kit that she hoped would start a long tradition of joyous bonding time spent meticulously decorating miniature houses with rows of identical candies lovingly placed by her granddaughters while she and I looked on. When we finally unwrapped the prebaked cookies and mixed the frosting it was close to Emma's bedtime and Mary had already given up for the night. I carefully separated the different candies into bowls and lined them up on the counter. Emma was so excited! Look at all of the candy!!!!! I ran the bag-o-frosting, otherwise know as the runny goop. The kit had provided about a pound of powdered sugar with which to make the frosting. Not bad, as I had used the same frosting the day before for cookie decorating, so I felt I would know exactly how to mix the "Royal Frosting" to make the best possible Gingerbread House glue. What I did not count on was that the frosting did not want to stay inside of the flimsy pastry bag the kit provided. Instead, it gushed out of the other end no matter hold I held or rolled the end. It also dripped out of the spout. I tried to put it in the refrigerator between uses, but Emma was too fast and it didn't have any time to harden. Hands were covered in white dripping goop. The counter was speckled with blobs of frosting. My sense of neatness and order was severely challenged. Emma placed candies, randomly, after frosting was placed on the cookie walls and roof. Unfortunately, Emma wanted to use the largest candies in the small areas and the smallest candies on the large expanses of the cookie roof. With foresight that only comes from many cooking experiences with a toddler, we chose to assemble the house after Emma decorated the pieces and went off to bed. After she was tucked in Mum and I used the runny goop to fill the channels where the walls would sit and make the base. The runny goop was very good at filling the channels to create some sort of white lagoon. Then came the roof. The runny goop was piled onto the edges of the walls and the first side was put on. It didn't really stay, so Mum held onto the edge. The second side was carefully balanced on top of the remaining portion of the house. It didn't stick either, so i held it in place. That left the problem of not enough hands to put the remaining frosting on. We held on. The frosting leaked out of the joints and down the house in some awful melting mess that did not really work for cementing cookie walls together. I made more frosting out of Jiffy frosting mix, thinking it would be a lot thicker than the runny goop the kit provided. It held the roof for a little over 2 minutes which was long enough for us to take pictures of the "finished" product. Then the roof began it's slow descent down the sides of the house. So we held onto it again. I added more frosting. The roof would not stay. Mum and I decided that a good stint outside would take care of the frosting being too soft. Seeing as it was 21 degrees outside, we thought it would work nicely. Unfortunately, after some help from Jim, we realized someone would have to hold the roof in place until it hardened a little bit. So I stood, in the snow, in the dark, in the cold and held onto the edges of the precariously balanced roof edges. And I waited. Mom stood in the doorway and tried to make conversation about anything that did not involving frosting or candy. I did ask her why she would buy this for a person she liked. She claims that she thought the kit would be easy! The cookies were already made. I informed THAT was the part I liked doing. I also suggested she might be better off buying such a kit for my sister in law. I think Lisa needs some bonding time with her daughter, just like I had.