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…

We’ve been finding so much sea glass this summer!  The Banana has quite a collection.  Inspired by someone from our church who makes beautiful art with sea glass, she has been busy creating with her treasures this week.

We discovered in the mini fridge not often used,  a crockpot that once upon a time held roast beef.  I took care of the disposal of the contents of the crock pot, but Mr. SP had the wonderful luck of washing the dishes that day, and when the lid came…

  You might recall from previous years that when we get together at the cabin, there is usually an evening pontoon ride.  The pontoon is rickety, worn out, a well-loved hunk of junk.  Every year I get on this pontoon, which looks substantially worse in comparison to the year before,…

It is a family tradition to have fancy Smores at the cabin.  Auntie Dot usually spearheads the effort and brings all sorts of yummy supplies to the campfire.  Unfortunately Auntie Dot was not able to share our cabin weekend with us this year (along with grandma and all those little…

  After delivering The Banana and Mr. TOF to Grandma Kathy, who was on her way for a week of camping in the Badlands with Mr. SP, Auntie Dot, and the small cousins, we spent a few days at the family lake cabin, and were joined by the big cousins…

Because sometimes teenagers are just . . . weird.  I love that about teenagers. In fact, I loved being a quirky, weird teenager.

Here’s a kidlet who I haven’t seen for three weeks because he was at music camp and then visited his grandparents.  He grew even more when he was away and came back sunburned, but happy.  (Being in control of the remote control at Grandma’s, as pictured above, also makes him…

The long driveway on Grandma and Grandpa’s farm is the perfect place to try driving for first time.  Yay!