“A castle, mama?” Alvin asks a few hours later, sitting on the kitchen table and combing through some of the plans I’ve sketched out on scrap paper with crayons I’ve borrowed from my boys. “To live in?”
“Well,” I say, leaning back and considering. “Maybe castle isn’t the right word. But palace is too fancy. And ‘big house’ is…too small.”
“Can we make it from gingerbread?” Ian asks, coming over to us with a pack of graham crackers that he opens and spills out on the table, starting to stack them so that they held each other up, like the walls of a house of cards. “Like this?”
“Don’t you think that baked goods would be…problematic? In the rain?” I ask seriously, c*****g my head to the side as I study his structure.
Ian stands up straight and stares at his building materials. “I didn’t ev
