A couple of weeks ago, Annalie and I drove up to Brenda & Bug’s to hang out with them for the day. This was something of a treat. Brenda’s husband Toby is a freelance photographer, and he works from home right now which makes playdates at their house a bit tricky. But on this day Toby was gone shooting from morning till night, so Brenda took advantage of it to invite us up for the day.

We packed a lot of fun into the time we had. We played at their house, we went out to lunch at a yummy Greek place, we went to a pet store and looked at all the cute puppies and kittens, we had frozen yogurt. We even went to the Japanese bookstore that is Brenda’s secret source for really cool stickers and awesome fine-line pens. I spent some time drooling over the assortment of cute mugs and amigurumi crochet books too.

Of course this was also a playdate for the moms. While the kids were doing puppet shows and watching Thumbelina, Brenda and I got to drink coffee and talk and play on our laptops.

By dinnertime, it was pretty hot in the house. We decided cooking was out of the question and walked down to the beach to pick up a pizza. Instead of trying to eat at the beach we walked a couple more blocks to a little park with a picnic bench. That was some gooooood pizza. What is it about eating outside that makes food taste so much better?

The girls had the playground to themselves, and boy did they have fun. They played hard and finally we had to tear them away and walk back home because it was getting late. When we got home, Bug was very tired. She said goodnight and went off to bed, her beloved pahs clutched in both hands, and fell right to sleep.

Earlier in the day we’d promised the girls that we could make sugar cookies and frost them. Annalie still wanted to do that, so we made the cookies from a mix and I made a small batch of buttercream frosting and colored it pink. Brenda had to come to the rescue and cut out the cookies for me, because the dough was so soft it was frustrating me. (It turned out that we needed to add an extra tablespoon of flour to the dough to make cut-out cookies, but it didn’t say that anywhere on the package. We had to go online to figure it out.)

The cookies spread quite a bit during baking and broke apart as we were frosting them. Oh well. Annalie didn’t care, and honestly neither did I. They were a mess but they still tasted good. We wrapped a few cookies to take home to Troy, packed up our stuff, headed back home.