Days of You and Me: Day 6, Baking Brownies

Yesterday morning, before even eating our breakfast, Annabelle and I made our way downstairs to the kitchen to bake a batch of chocolate brownies.

Originally, I’d thought we’d make a banana bread, though when I asked Annabelle what she preferred . . . well, you can guess what kind of goodies my 2 year old likes . . .

Chocolate brownies were her first choice.

For our morning of baking, Annabelle decided to wear her cowgirl hat; perhaps she knew that all the mixing, melting, pouring, and waiting that goes into baking requires the wearing of a smart hat.  As the old saying goes: “Boots, chaps and cowboy hats…. nothing else matters.”

“Yee-ha!” she hollered.  “Let’s bake.”

We put out a few basic ingredients.  Annabelle was ecstatic to see butter among them . . . my little girl could eat a stick of butter.  Don’t worry.  We still haven’t let her do that (yet).

Breaking the eggs . . .

Mixing it all up and letting it all hang out . . .  What isn’t captured here are those pictures of us taking a lick, here and there, off of the mixing spoon . . .

Tick, tick, tick . . . the waiting begins.  At this point, her dad was awake and decided to take a short walk over to the mailbox.

where to our surprise and delight, we found this cute earth tee, sent to us from our friend Ruth, the Everyday Woman.  Annabelle smiled through her chocolate coated teeth and shouted, “THANK YOU!”

(We love the tee, Ruth.  Thank you so much for thinking of us.  Oh, and it’s one of Annabelle’s favorite colors: blue. )

After a little while longer, the brownies “were cooked,” as they say, and the time had come for, well, more waiting.  Annabelle and I played for a bit, and when the brownies were cooled, her dad did us the favor of cutting them and taking them out of the pan.

But since it was Independence Day and I wanted to create the perfect chocolate brownie photo op, I arranged our goodies in a star spangled basket:

Finally, the time had come for eating our brownies . . . and with all that sugar, chocolate, and yum, we had the energy to do this:

draw a chalk outlined race course through the parking lot . . . and run it,

draw a chalk outlined tracing of ourselves (this one is Annabelle),

kick and play ball,

ride our trike,

and give our photo snapping mamma a run for her money . . . yeah, that’s right, she was riding straight at me.  I think I set a speed record for a pregnant woman making her way out of the way.

At this point, I guess I could’ve used Annabelle’s cowgirl hat and hollered a good old, “Yee-ha!”

See, starting the day with a batch of brownies makes for a good day. At least that’s the way it goes in our house.