Gingerbread Drama

A little background. Matthew's kindergarten teacher does a fun literature activity in the month of December. The class reads the story of the Gingerbread Man. They put a gingerbread man in the oven. The man "runs away" and friends and family members send postcards to the school stating that they've seen the cookie running around in various places. Then the class marks a map with all the places the cookie has been. It's a fun activity and the kids love it.

It was on Monday that the gingerbread man disappeared from the oven. Yesterday, I subbed in Matthew's class and those kids were super hyped up on all the I absolutely must find the gingerbread man and surely he left the school and went directly to my own home and I must capture him. No joke, they spent all of recess searching through wood chips for the escapee.

Today, right after I picked Matthew up from school, I was wrapping some presents. He was occupied cutting and drawing on an empty wrapping paper roll. Suddenly, he jumped up and said, "Can we go on a walk right now?" Apparently, he'd been drawing a map of our neighborhood. He wanted to go in search of the gingerbread man. It couldn't wait. I asked him what he planned to do if he found the gingerbread man. "I made a fake gingerbread mama and I'm going to trick him. Then I'm going to grab him and put him in my backpack and take him to my teacher right away."

Wow.

Five minutes later we were bundled up in warm jackets. The dog was on his leash--we'd decided that having a dog along would help us sniff out the cookie. Matthew had his map, which was curled at both ends so that he could pull it open like a scroll whenever he needed to consult it. "It might be a long walk, mom. This could take awhile."

He twisted and turned around our neighborhood instructing me to follow him this way and that. I could see that this was, indeed, going to be a long walk. I was a little hungry and my ears were getting cold. So I did what any sensible mother would do in the same situation. I howled that I'd spotted him and took off at a dead sprint. He's easily tricked and started yelling that he saw him too. I stopped at a series of bushes and said, "I think he went in here." As we rustled through the leaves, I had every intention of saying something like, "Well, he must have got away. I guess it's time to head home for some lunch." Instead, the dog started sniffing like crazy. No doubt another dog before him had watered this particular bush.

"HE SMELLS HIM!" Matthew screamed. "Where is he, Beck? Help me find him!" Just then, Beck turned and lifted his leg. In all the excitement, Matthew decided that precise moment was a perfect time to jump directly in front of the dog to resume his search. And that dog marked the jean clad leg of my precious kindergartner.

There we stood. One woman. One dog. One five-year-old with a very wet leg. "Let's go change your pants," I told Matthew.

"NO! We haven't found that gingerbread man yet!" he wailed.

"Our search is going to have to wait."

Once again, I do not understand how we don't have our own show. A kindergartner making a decoy gingermama and getting peed on by a golden retriever would surely be network gold.