Our host child departed from O’Hare airport in Chicago this past weekend, which was of course, sad and hard.  The Banana flew to Chicago with us, and after the goodbye that is always difficult, we stayed in Chicago for a few extra days. To distract ourselves from feeling gloomy, we became…

Last week I loaded up three kids and we headed to pick raspberries.  Our tried and true raspberry farm close to our house closed a few years ago, so now we have to drive a bit in the other direction to get raspberries.  I was prepared for a few hours…

When you complain that everyone else has a headband, and you don’t, your aunt just might let you borrow one of hers.

When you take a crew of cousins (and a bag of towels and a pan of bars) to the beach, sometimes there’s so much going on that you don’t even know which direction to aim your camera.  It was a frenzy of activity!  We arrived for the blue hour, just…

There are so many more pictures from this trip to the beach, but I can’t share them because they include our host child.  It is sufficient to say, however, that a wonderful time was had, and our host child was caught right up in the middle of it!  There was…

Leaving to go anywhere with almost 20 extended family members all together takes time.  A lot of time.  Way more time than you think it would take, even when you tell yourself to leave a lot of extra time!  It’s best to just embrace it! I’m learning to play with…

My favorite part of “Cousin Weekend” (when a whole horde of wonderful relatives were sleeping at my house) might have been these dueling trumpets.  My niece is an amazing trumpet player, and while she was practicing, (can I interject another parenthetical expression to tell you that I LOVE hearing her…

  My friends came traversing across a state and a half to visit me!  We had such a good time.  When you put all of our kids together it looked like we had such a big group, but the truth of the matter was, we were actually MISSING 5 kids…