When life runs out of gin, make gingerbread

...or something along those lines.


Yesterday was a particularly grey day. Rainy and drippy, muddy and slippery, there hadn't been much cheer going on outside.

When I was growing up, rainy days were gingerbread days. I'm sure there was some scientific reasoning behind it, like the humidity helping the gingerbread. Or maybe there wasn't. Maybe it just felt right.


Whatever the reason (or lack thereof), rainy days make me want to do two things: smell gingerbread and go camping.


Rainy days make my children want to get out the art supplies. Oh, all right, EVERY day makes my children want to get out the art supplies.


So yesterday, bolstered by two cups of delicious caffeine (well, one-and-a-half, really, since Gideon drank half of my cuppa joe) and a notice from the library saying there were FOUR eagerly-awaited books ready for us, we got to work. The children painted and drew, and I stirred.


Some of the children photographed.

(And let me just pause and say right now that you really feel you've arrived as an adult when you spontaneously decide to put on a scarf, because "What today needs is a spot of color, and what I need is my hair out of my face" only to have a child find you in your scarf and declare loudly, "Everyone! Come see Mama! She looks ridicleee-us!"; and yet you find yourself leaving the scarf on long enough for all seven others to parade into the kitchen, pronounce [in varying degrees of vocabulary], "You look hysterical!" and also "Can I help?" and you even allow the first offensive child to grab your camera and document how incredibly silly you look. I feel so mature I can hardly stand it.)


And because two pans of gingerbread are just as easy to make as one, and because two batches truly make the kitchen smell twice as nice, and because I have a friend whose sick little ones have caused me to catch her for only five minutes in the past two weeks and surely they wouldn't mind a bit of gingerbread and some paintings, and the library gave me the perfect excuse to HAVE to get out so we might as well swing by and drop off some goodies...


We headed out. Out to deliver some love and sweets and, hopefully, cheer (I kept my scarf on ... according to my children, THAT was sure to get some smiles).

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