My mother-in-law grows a garden each summer.  In it are vegetables, like delicious cucumbers and crisp, sweet carrots, and cutting flowers that she picks and arranges to take to people to brighten their day.  After learning about our carrot harvest disaster of 2009, this year she decided to plant extra…

Cousins.  Sometimes they are cause  for the employment of that first class secret weapon:  projectile vomit of stinky curdled milk.

We were in North Dakota over the weekend.  It was a 50 hour trip.  I did not know why we were making this 50 hour trip to North Dakota in December, and quite frankly I was pretty skeptical about the idea.  In fact, I was pretty grouchy about the idea.…

Pigtails . . . fresh from the shower.  Oh how we love them around here!  The Banana likes them because they are fun.  The Mama likes them because they are are so stinking cute, the way they just curl right up in a little spiral, and then dry so soft…

Squirmy LOVES a face to play with.  He likes kid faces, dad faces, mom faces.  Faces make my little guy happy and he bestows upon them his hugest, slobbery toothless grin, the kind of grin that sort of looks like a dinosaur about to devour its prey, if dinosaurs actually…

While I cooked Thanksgiving dinner the kidlets set up a school in the piano living room.  Guess who was the teacher? She had a wonderful time being in charge, and her patient students were very obedient, which is why playing school was an activity that lasted several hours.  The students…

The choice for breakfast in the bathtub was homemade granola and “kid yogurt” (vanilla yogurt, as opposed to plain Greek yogurt which is referred to as “Mama yogurt.”  Mama yogurt has significantly less sugar in it in comparison to kid yogurt.).  We were up extra early to fit in presents…

It is a Mason-Dietrich tradition to make raspberry rice pudding each year for Thanksgiving (and often for Christmas too).  The pudding is rich, sweet and utterly delicious.  You may recall reading it about in the past when we shared Thanksgiving with friends in Wisconsin, although by the time I actually…

The Banana:  You heat up your oven to 8 degrees. Classmate 1:  You bake the turkey for 5 minutes. Classmate 2:  If the turkey falls on the floor, you clean it up really good. Classmate 3:  Then you stick it in the microwave. Admittedly, I didn’t try this procedure with…