fresh baked

Best field trip EVER. Never was there a better day to be a preschool parent! We arrived at Bud's Best Cookies at our appointed time, which (happily enough) was 10 this morning. Since it was an hour's drive, it was nice to have plenty if non-rush-hour time to make the trip. Dennis has been anticipating his "cookie factory trip" all weekend, and it exceeded all of our expectations. We were handed hair nets and empty cups and herded onto a train. We were driven past giant mixers and giant ovens with nifty display windows. We saw conveyor belts and cookie shakers and two super cool packaging robots lovingly labeled "Lucy" and "Ethel". We learned that the ingredients and boxes and labels are locally made, and we saw empty tractor trailers backed up to the building waiting to be filled. We saw millions of cookies all boxed up and ready to go. And we were stopped during the tour so that our empty cups could be filled to overflowing with warm vanilla wafers just out of the oven. Mmmmmmmmmmmm! The place smelled heavenly, and we were given packages of vanilla wafers and chocolate chip cookies. There are over a dozen other flavors, so we stopped to buy butterfinger cookies and chocolate sandwich cookies with peanut butter filling along with some oatmeal cookies for Gigi.

David further increased Dennis' sugar high induced joy by turning the car north a couple of miles to Toys 'R Us. He looked at hundreds of toys, sang their theme song, tried out some bicycles (he wants a new 16" bicycle for his upcoming birthday along with the kids' treadmill he's been asking for), picked out a guitar he'd love to own (red with chrome flames), and selected a new tool set for his Daddy to get for him. We've been hammered and socket wrenched and pliered and pipe-wrenched nearly to death now. He's been asking me to assign him 'projects' all day, and he's decided that we need to build a new dog house (a red one, of course) for Tabasco. He said to David "I'm going to need you to get some wood and a can of red paint tomorrow."

Today was a fun one!