The Gingerbread House Fiasco

During Christmas, Elfis sometimes leaves little notes or surprises for Eli to find in the morning when he wakes up. One morning, Elfis had gotten into the marshmallows again and had left a note saying "Make a Gingerbread House". Eli and I were very excited about making a gingerbread house for the second time. It's something we really enjoyed last year and had been looking forward to since the Christmas season started. I made sure the next time I was at the store to pick up a gingerbread house for us to decorate. 

Now it never even crossed my mind to open the box and check to see if the gingerbread house was intact because the one we did last year was perfect. No breaks or chips or anything. So on the night we chose to decorate the gingerbread house I opened the box and found that EVERY SINGLE PIECE was cracked and broken. Not just one piece mind you, but every single piece. UGH!! Eli, bless his little heart, was so positive and assured me that I could use the icing like glue to piece the broken pieces back together. I did my absolute best, but it's kind of hard to stabilize a roof that's cracked in half. I decided to scrap the from the box gingerbread house and make my own using graham crackers. Well, that would have worked, but I'd used way too much icing trying to piece the store bought one together. Eli kept trying to assure me that it was okay and that we could make it work, but I finally had to realize that this just wasn't going to be our night. This was what my table looked like after about an hour of trying to make the gingerbread house. It was a disaster area.

We may have lost the battle, but we were determined to win the war :) The next time we were at the store we picked up another gingerbread house kit and this time we checked to make sure that every piece was intact. We were so happy when we saw that everything looked great! 

This time everything was just picture perfect. We had so much fun decorating our gingerbread house and at the end we couldn't have been happier with the results! 

Graceland

Since our race was canceled, we decided to make the most of our mini-vacation to Memphis. The town of Memphis worked with the race officials for St. Jude and offered LOTS of discounts to touristy-type events for all the runners that had traveled to the city for the St. Jude race. I thought that was incredibly nice of them to take care of us like that! One of the places that runners could get a discount was Graceland, so we all loaded up and went to visit the place Elvis once called home. 

I had actually been to Graceland before when I was a baby, but I have ZERO recollection of it (obviously). It was neat to see where this mega super star once lived and worked.

Living room

This was the part of the house that was closed off to visitors. The audio guide said that Elvis always greeted his guests on the stairs and they were never allowed upstairs where his bedroom was. He wanted to keep part of his life private. Poor guy probably never got a moments peace. 

Priscilla and Lisa Marie

Dining room

Kitchen

Media room

Billard room

Jungle room

This was called the Hall of Gold.

Racquetball room that was converted to his trophy room after he died.

The entire Presley family is buried on the grounds. 

It wasn't how we intended for our race weekend to go, but we still had fun! After this we left and had some AMAZING Memphis barbecue at Central BBQ. Oh my word. It was DELICIOUS! We'll definitely go to that place again! The rest of our weekend was spent relaxing, shopping, and having fun. We can't wait to go back to Memphis again next year, but this time it'll be to run the half-marathon! Fingers crossed starting now for no bad weather!!