ice cream shop robbed!

[me: "okay, Mare, a really big smile now" awesome.]

Nathan & I take turns staying home with Marian from church for now (although we are fine going about town a bit with a mask, the very love we feel at church precludes her going there: too many little germ breathers will hover), and this week was my turn. Our private religious instruction was...ice cream. She did wear a Sunday dress, though. She recently received the flower girl dress for my brother's upcoming wedding in the mail, which excited her about the last flower girl dress :). Perfect little apron made for her 2nd birthday by our darling friend Cynthia (hey, Cynthia, get a blog so I can link you here!).

Marian was at the computer with me while I was scrolling through my google reader subscriptions when she spotted a salt dough ice cream parlor featured on The Crafty Crow. So Sunday's "what shall we do today?" was easily answered by "Remember that ice cream for a play store...?"




They were all marvelous. We mixed in food coloring and cocoa to make colors and ripples and used bamboo skewers and the stick left over from our fireworks punk for popsicle sticks. Used cherry pits and bits of our yard's ubiquitous sycamore bark for nuts. Broke shale into pieces for chocolate chips.

The robbery (alas!!!):
Tonight, downloading photos, I saw these of her mixing and creating and remembered that I had put the salt dough out to dry (after an hour in a slow oven...too hot!) in a sunny (and out-of-usual-sight) spot on a picnic table in our yard that is partially overgrown by a lilac bush and seldom used. 2 days ago. So I rushed out in the dark and found the cookie sheet on the ground; no icies in sight. When I was frantically ransacking my daughters' recently-rearranged bedroom for a flashlight to aid my searching, the older, still awake, responded to my frantically narrated tale (what will Marian say!??) with, "Well, at least none of the good ones were there."
"???" "I saw the tray there today and only a couple of scoops and popsicles were on it." Apparently one of our animal neighbors (there are all sorts of burrows in our yard, and rabbits and groundhog sighted) liked the salt, has been munching, and finished them up tonight. Arrghh!! Audrey and I are plotting how to spin it to Marian as fun ("You know how we don't want to really eat your ice cream? I think something does!") and remake tomorrow. I'm still a bit sick. Lousy mum.