It is well known that going outside has many benefits. The fresh air, the invitation to physical activity, and the opportunity to rest the eyes on the beauty of our natural world are just a few that come to mind.

Another is the blessed reality that the outside is, by definition, not inside. Which means that if you are a parent, whenever your children are outside, the inside of your house stays clean. Or at least as clean as it was when the kids made their exit.

Even more importantly, nothing resets a grouchy kid (or parent) like a little fresh air. Laughter may be the best medicine, but outdoor play is a close second.

The only problem is that children do not always want to go outside when Mom and Dad think they should. Their sense of timing is quite different from ours, and although you may want them to spend the baby’s naptime playing outside where the baby can’t hear them, the kids may prefer to use this time to have a pillow fight in the living room, waking the baby with the sounds of their unbearable conviviality.

It turns out that children do not always willingly cooperate with their parents’ plans.

Now, there are many solutions to this problem. On days when the kids don’t spontaneously play outdoors, you can still enforce mandatory outside time using your ample natural authority. You can make the yard more fun by buying fifty eight-foot two-by-fours and showing the kids how to use them as life-size Lincoln Logs, and then you can disappear back into the house while they build. You can set up the Slip ‘n’ Slide and resign yourself to eating beans for the next week in order to be able to pay the resulting water bill. You can even give them a list of outside chores to do and then unceremoniously shut the door on their complaints.

I have tried all of the above techniques and can report considerable success with each. But as with nearly all things in parenting, the most effective way of getting your children to embrace outdoor life is, of course, to model the practice yourself. That means that you — yes, you with the hurting back and the wailing baby in your arms and far, far too much to do — need to go outside sometimes, too, and probably more often than you think. Because it is very good for you, too.

Often, going outside is a pure delight, not just for a child but also for the average overworked adult. The summer breeze blows, the children play happily at being Pevensies, and you and your favorite neighbors sit in lawn chairs drinking craft beers and telling yourselves that this is the life. Going outside is not a problem when you, well, want to go.

But what do you do on those occasions when neither you nor your children want to go outside, and yet you can tell by the saggy feeling of your face and the rising pitch of the kids’ voices that if you don’t somehow get some fresh air pronto, every single one of you is going to completely blow his or her respective top? What about when you’re so tired that you can barely keep your eyes open, but you can’t take a nap because if you close them for even a nanosecond the two-year-old will empty a bag of flour into your underwear drawer while also giving himself a haircut? Then what do you do?

Enter the cookie ramble.

What is a cookie ramble, you ask? Well, it is a ramble, with cookies. It may seem simple or silly, but hear me out. A well-placed cookie ramble has gotten me out of many a tight spot as a parent. Neither my children nor I myself have ever been able to resist the offer of a cookie ramble. It is simply too attractive, even in the heat or the cold.

There are two main reasons for this: the ramble, and the cookies. For, first of all, a cookie ramble is not a walk. You are not trying to get somewhere. You are not under pressure. You can move as quickly or slowly as you want.

You don’t have to feel thwarted if someone is grumpy or lags behind. You won’t be frustrated when people stop for the sixty-seventh time to pick up a rock, because you have no agenda other than being outside and eating cookies. You may have a plan for where you are going and what you will do, but you are not attached to this plan in the slightest.

As you wander along, you make a mental note of how longish it has been so far, and at some point you announce, with great and ceremonial gravitas, that it is time for the first Cookie Stop.

This is where the magic really begins. For here is what has happened: you have taken your grouchy, unpleasant self, you who so recently felt like you had control over exactly nothing, and turned yourself into your children’s absolute favorite person. And what’s more, you have achieved the impossible: you have convinced your children to grant you almost unlimited authority.

Because you have what they want. You have the cookies.

So now you have many wonderful options in front of you to play with, encourage, and cheer these wonderful kids whom, after all, you adore. How will you tease them as you pass out the cookies? How will you cajole them out of their bad moods — because they, too, have been feeling pretty rotten today?

Will you make them hop on one foot in a circle to get a cookie? Will you tell them that they can decide in what order they will get cookies, but that whoever gets the last cookie also gets to decide whether you turn left or right at the next corner? Will you pretend to find the cookies under a rock that looks very much like a fairy’s house? Will you tell a story about the life of the cookies up until this point? Will you make your own cookie run away because it doesn’t want to be eaten? (Just make sure to catch it.)

Onward you go until the next stop. The kids are excited now. Maybe at this stop you can stand on a fallen tree and tell them that you are Ethan Allen and they are the Green Mountain Boys and you’re about to take Fort Ticonderoga. First one over the hill gets to pass out the cookies!

Any number of things can work to liven up the grumpy walker. Scavenger hunts are always a good idea, especially if younger kids are slowing down the older ones: send the older kids down the next block with instructions to come back with two yellow leaves that are the same size but different shapes; have the younger ones look for yellow leaves right where you are.

If you’re into memory work, find a comfortable log and have each kid recite a poem in exchange for raucous applause and a cookie. Or you can tell a story and have the story continue at each stop. This is good if you’re pregnant or tired or have a bum knee and don’t really want to do much walking.

Is there a particularly dark part of the woods near your house? Name it Hansel & Gretel’s Forest. Or is there a bamboo grove nearby? Have the older kids knock on the owner door’s and ask permission, and then have them cut some long bamboo stalks so that when you get home they can make a teepee with the bamboo, some string, and a large sheet. Instant cookie fort!

If the kids are into weaponry or playing frontier, pull out your pocket knife (for you have the wisdom to carry a pocket knife when rambling) and whittle some arrows while the kids figure out how to make a bow from a piece of string and some green wood. Then take turns shooting arrows; wherever an arrow lands, that’s the next stop on your ramble! If anybody’s uncooperative, they don’t get a cookie. It’s their choice. They can try again at the next stop. Even grumpy thirteen-year-olds do actually want the cookies.

On you go, until you run out of cookies or run out of energy or you just decide to go home. You can be as creative or as boring about what you do with it as you want to be. You don’t have to be Ethan Allen. You can just drape yourself over the fallen tree and silently proffer store-bought wafers, if that’s all you can manage.

And since you don’t have any goals other than eating cookies and being outside, you can go home at any time. So if disaster strikes in one way or another, it’s still a win: you all got outside, and you personally got at least one cookie. And you are at least thirty minutes closer to bedtime and your nightly visit to your secret chocolate stash than you were when you started.

Cookie rambles also work well as a large-group activity and are wonderful fun when you and the kids need some social time. Our outdoor winter playgroup hosted a cookie ramble this January that drew sixty children and allowed the leader of the ramble (yours truly) to introduce them to a number of wonderful spots off in the woods. I took the opportunity at each stop to either tell them a story – I told them, for example, that one clearing in the woods was where the Tomten strung their hammocks every night – or have them do some sort of adventurous task, like crawl under a “tree cave” made of drooping branches or walk balance-beam style along a fallen tree trunk. Meanwhile, the other parents welcomed the chance to trail behind and talk.

Additionally, the next time we had a playdate at that location, many of the kids ran right off to the cookie ramble spots, having learned that they could adventure a little more boldly than they had previously thought. They expanded their horizons, the parents had fun, and we all got fresh air and treats. We prepped ahead by having parents volunteer to bring cookies and establishing ground rules for the walk; and in fact, for our next large-group cookie ramble, the older children of several families have agreed to be in charge of baking and bringing the cookies themselves!

And what did the kids think? When I asked the playgroup children later on what they had thought of the ramble, the response was universally positive. One particular family of kids put it quite plainly: “We liked the hiking! And the cookies!”

All seem to find something they can enjoy in this flexible little adventure, because the only requirements are food and movement, and it works for all ages and personalities. For one of the best things about the cookie ramble is that it can be whatever you want it to be for that group of people on that day, whether an expansive, imaginative, and educational adventure or simply a time for you to stroll along and ignore each other in between cookies and think your own thoughts.

On a cookie ramble, it doesn’t matter if you don’t like how you look in shorts or one of the kids still has her pajama shirt on. It doesn’t even matter if you’re eating healthily, because you flatly do not intend to. The cookie ramble is not burdensome, it has few requirements, and it almost always helps.

The point is, we all need strategies for turning a bad day around, especially when we are running short on self-discipline due to stress. Sometimes we just need to give ourselves permission to make one more cup of coffee. Sometimes the kids need a long bath and to play with the shaving cream. Sometimes a spontaneous lunch with a friend is in order. Sometimes hot chocolate, a fire, and a good book are what best revives us.

But for those times when motivation is low and what you really need is to step outside of the building and outside of yourself, give a cookie ramble a try. Whether big or small, long or short, spontaneous or planned, a ramble in the fresh air with a bag of treats is guaranteed to remind you that there is a world out there that is bigger than your problems. And it’s a pretty nice world, too — after all, it comes with cookies.