Super Rachel Zana's Spot

The summer that I was eleven, I rode my bike to town once a week and took art lessons from my great grandmother, with a skinny boy who was a year older than me whom my great grandmother really liked.  He came to visit her a lot.  I was terrible…

This time of year, Lake Superior is a massive artist, sculpting miles and miles of fickle,  icy artwork along her jutted shores.  It never ceases to amaze me how the ice changes from day to day.  One day it will appear frozen over for miles and miles, and the next…

Dogsledding is a big deal where I live.  I never really anticipated living in a place where dogsledding would be a big deal, but the fever for it this time of year is quite contagious.  (There was a very big and important dogsled race throughout Northern Minnesota that started and…

The temperature actually rose above freezing this weekend, so we spent as much time outside as possible. Saturday afternoon we went to the beach and played on the icy landscape.  To make things even more fun, we brought along a few boards from our scrap pile.  In the hands of…

The child who NEVER likes his picture taken actually ran in and asked me to get out my camera, take this picture and put it on my blog so that Grandpa Ron and Papa Richard could see it.  He's making his VERY special cowboy face, because, as he put it,…

We opened a box that hadn't been opened for a long time, and inside was a children's picture book that one of my favorite classes from my days of being an English teacher had given Sarah for a baby gift when she was born.  They all signed the front cover.…

This is the second grade version of me, competing in the clothespin drop contest at playday.  The object of this contest was to stand on the chair and drop clothespins into a jar that you can barely see in the bottom of the picture.   When Sarah saw this picture,…

Although I love winter, and I'm not even all that terribly tired of it yet, this week, yet another week of extremely cold temperatures and a lot of staying inside, has made me crave green foilage a little bit. Aren't house plants nice? Mine would be even nicer if I…

It was a festive morning at Mr. Sneaky Pant's preschool today.  The Banana and I attended a parade, where three long dragons wound themselves around the room.  The dragon heads were boxes painted by the students, and behind each dragon head tromped many dragon feet under a long piece of…

Today, in the car on the way home from preschool: Mr. Sneaky Pants:  Did you know Mrs. Lindgren has those things on her teeth? Those bracelets?  And she can't ever take them off until summer time.  That's a long time from now.  She has to eat her cheese stick very…