Today

We took to the yard in light-weight jackets.

Nate napped outside, nestled in his car seat on the patio.

I took down the, ahem, Christmas lights still clinging to our fence posts that between the baby, the surgeries, the sicknesses, and all things everyday, I had forgotten were still up (and our neighbors, too sweet to mention it, had let go without the faintest hint of a "you realize it's almost EASTER, don't you?).

Audrey played a game of tag with the neighbor's dog, neither one the least bit deterred by the fence posts in between.

We came in and invited the outdoors to come with us, closing only the screen door.

I did the dishes while watching two grown children swing in perfect unison.

As the sounds wafted in, we tossed together a pinch of this and cup of that. (Did you know they made measuring spoons for dashes and smidgens? Sometimes, even the smallest amounts count. Of course, these spoons were a gift from my mother, because mothers tend to know that the smallest things count.)

We made this bread that eats like cake. We broke into it before it had properly cooled and didn't bother to sit at the table.

Some days are bread that eats like cake: warm to the touch, sweet to the nose. They contain hints of forgotten magic (even if that magic is best stored away until December) that make you laugh at yourself. They remind us that barriers only exist where we see them, playgrounds need only be outgrown if we desire them to be, and sometimes, all you need is a smidgen.

For those of you interested in the bread, here are a few of our baking notes:

The recipe says to preheat your oven to 200 degrees C. We preheated ours to 350 degrees F. We baked our bread for around 40 minutes, our oven tends to bake on the fast side.

The recipes calls for 4 bananas. We used 3, because that's what we had on-hand, minus one bite - apparently, they didn't look overripe to Audrey.

The recipe uses 250 g of flour. We used 1 1/4 c.

It also calls for 125 g of dark or milk chocolate. I found a king-sized Hershey bar in the pantry and chopped 3/4 of it into tiny pieces, since the 2 bags of dark chocolate chips I had bought for just this recipe, ahem, disappeared a chip at a time with no final food product to show for themselves (I guess they eat like cake, too).