Super Rachel Zana's Spot

The Devious Snail had a very chaotic birthday. He arrived home just hours before his birthday started from a very long day at a robotics competition/workshop, and he was majorly exhausted the next day. It didn’t stop me from waking him up in time for breakfast in the bathtub before…

Each year in our city a holiday parade takes place the Friday before Thanksgiving. It is a lengthy parade with many floats, marching bands and a lot of dance teams. I am not sure why the mostly Christmas parade happens the Friday before Thanksgiving, but who am I to have…

I’ve been experimenting a bit with pumpkin pie this month, which means we’ve been enjoying eating a lot of pumpkin pie. I’m not great at making pie crust, so pies are sometimes an intimidating baking project. In the past I’ve made pies with a pressed crust, and they were good.…

We were blessed with so many apples this fall, and I’ve been loving applesauce. My husband bought a new knife (with a purple handle!) that has proven to be the perfect knife for cutting hundreds and hundreds of apples. It’s also a great season for pears! A perfectly ripe pear…

Putting a warm rice bag under my coat makes me feel so cozy while I’m sitting in the car waiting for the resident oboist at her Wednesday afternoon lesson. I learned that I do not know how to successfully navigate music stand extenders after last Wednesday’s violin/viola/harp recital when I…

When I was in third grade, we learned about North Dakota in our social studies class. One of my favorite days of third grade was the day when our teacher gave us each a cardboard piece cut in the shape of North Dakota and a big bowl of salt dough.…

The applesauce is made! We were blessed with three totes of apples from a friend’s apple tree along with a couple of bags of apples from other friends and neighbors, which made for a lot of applesauce! Over the past two weekends I spent many hours cooking and straining apples,…

Yesterday I saw a post on social media from a mom I know from church. Her daughter had a school assignment that asked her to write the four phrases she heard most in her house, and the daughter wrote lovely things like, “I love you; I’m proud of you; please…