The leaves have begun their turn toward radiant hues of orange, yellow and red.  Autumn is my favorite time of year, and although it is a bit slower to come this year, I had an amazing drive on Saturday morning to photograph a client who lives up and away from…

  After the mud obstacle course on Sunday, some kids elected to go to the beach for a few minutes, and some elected to stay home and do some additional showering before practicing their instruments and squaring away any unfinished homework.  The sun mostly hid behind a large shelf of…

If a child “spills” a bottle of wart remover (salicylic acid) on the seat of your van, it will eat through the leather. The residue will turn white and crusty and will not scrape off no matter what tools you might conceive of using.   It turns out leather is,…

  It was a somewhat spontaneous decision on our part to show up for the Dirt Yard Dash, which is put on by the church  where our neighbor at the top of the hill works.  For the last several years, this church, which sits on a plot of forest and…

Tis the season for applesauce!  This year I made quite a lot of applesauce from the tiny apples on our crab apple tree.  Crab apple sauce is not for everyone.  In fact, most people in our family have rejected it at this point, but I love it!  It packs a…

These middle kids might look sad, but they were really just goofing around.    I’m not sure WHAT they were doing when I was taking this picture.  They likely hatched some kind of crazy plan together in secret.  It’s a frequent occurrence.   They are always conspiring about one thing or…

We have a favorite candy shop, just a bit up the North Shore at Knife River.  Because we pretty much can’t contain ourselves when we go, I try to limit our visits there to one or two per summer and let us splurge when we do go.  All summer long…

I had completely forgotten about the hot air balloon festival this year.  Dr. Peds was driving home from a conference in the Cities, and when he got home he mentioned that the balloons were actually all standing up!  I grabbed the only kid home at the time (everyone else was…

Mr. Trouble on Feet and I were on a morning hike last Friday when we rounded the corner and saw this little guy chirping at us.  He was on a tree branch right next to the hiking path and didn’t really seem concerned that we were right there, other than…

While YaYa was at piano lessons we checked a few Little Free Libraries in her teacher’s neighborhood.  We love the design of this particular library, and found a couple of treasures inside.