1. How To Love: Your Family

I liked this quote because every child should be loved.  Every single one.  But some…are not loved.  And they grow up to become adults who have to relearn how to love.

That adult could be you.  It could be someone you know.  It could be family.

So, how do we love family?

Sometimes you are around your family for so long, you can’t even think of how to love them.  Why?  Because “you just do…”

I was in Target this morning picking up a few extra things for Christmas, and there were a few parents in there trying to figure out what their kids liked these days.  I can totally understand this, because on a day-to-day basis…I know what my kids want!  They want food, shelter, and the loving security of home.  I know that’s a broad stroke, but that is what makes them happy on a deep level.

On a smaller level?  Legos and Sofia the First.

To break this question down, though, think about what you can give your family with your Time, Talent and Treasure.

Time: Spend quality time with family.  This could be talking with your son, and listening to what is on his mind, while he unloads the dishwasher. It could be listening to your daughter before she goes to bed. It could be cuddling with someone on the couch.  It could be taking a walk with them.  Time doesn’t have to be pre-planned…it just has to be honest to goodness time.

Talent: Right now my kids are eating lemon poppy-seed muffins I just baked in the oven.  This is something I can do for them to make their day happier.  I also use my talents of homemaking, planning and teaching to love them.  Although, this week they are being loved by me by getting a Christmas break… 😉

Treasure: Treasure is something special.  It is the extra hug, it is the special smile, it the extra time you spent with them.  Treasure is unique to each person, which is why it is a treasure.

2. How To Love: Your Friends

Friends are just a step below family…but even they have very special needs.

Sometimes friends need to know you are thinking about them…text them!

Friends like to laugh with you…so send them something that made you laugh!

Friends love eating with you…bring dinner over!

Friends love spending time with you…a bottle of wine and lively conversation is all you need.

Even friends with a hard outer shell need to know they are loved.

Stormtroopers are really hopeless romantics, underneath.

3. How To Love: People You Don’t Know

I saw this the other day, and I am totally hooked.

I am planning on doing this with my kids for New Years’ Day!

Saturday morning, my son walked into my room and said he wanted to use his money to help the homeless. I asked him what he had in mind, and he said he wanted to make them lunches. I have to be honest, I almost tried to talk him into just holding on to his money and having mom and dad pay for it, but the light in his eyes told me to just roll with it.

My son put me on sandwich duty while he stuffed the bags with the stuff he picked out at the store.

Proud little guy.

Lunch on the counter.

Lunch in the car.

He did most of the handing-out by himself, but this was the only picture we got of us actually giving the stuff out.

4. How To Love: People You Disagree With…Or Even Worse, Hate

I found this image, and it just cracked me up.

Haters are the worst.  I hate haters.  You hate this group?  And that group?  And that entire brand of people?  Holy cow, that’s a lot of hate for one little person.  But, I laugh at myself because I am convicted of not only loving the loveless…but I also am convicted to love the haters. (yuck)

Loving your enemies is really hard.

Sometimes enemies are actually genuinely dangerous, and you shouldn’t be around them.  Sometimes they are people in your past.  Sometimes they are people in your present.

Most of the time, though, they are people we disagree with.

If I was to start down the rabbit trail of learning how to love my enemies, I’d start with that.  Love people you disagree with, and see how that goes first.

Life is so much nicer once you learn how to love people 🙂  (true story, bro.)

5. How To Love: God

Love is important to God.

We misunderstand how to love on a daily basis…but God knows. He also knows us, and He knows we are trying to learn how to love.  For a lot of us, it takes time.  But that is time well spent, learning how to love like God.

1 Corinthians 13 (ESV)

The Way of Love

13 “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³ If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned,^[a] but have not love, I gain nothing.

⁴ Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;^{[b] 6} it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

⁸ Love never ends….¹³ So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

Rick Warren says this:

“Over and over again in the Bible, God commands us to love each other, and you can’t command an emotion. If I told you right now, “Be sad!” you couldn’t be sad on cue. Just like an actor, you can fake it, but you’re not wired for your emotions to change on command.

If love were just an emotion, then God couldn’t command it. But love is something youdo. It can produce emotion, but love is an action. 

The Bible says, “Let’s not merely say that we love each other; let us show the truth by our actions” (1 John 3:18 NLT). We can talk a good act: “I love people.” But do we really love them? Our love is revealed in how we act toward them.”

The greatest commandment is to love each other.

So, let’s do that 🙂

#RealMoms

Those who know me…I mean, really know me…know that I suck at baking.

I don’t know what happens in my normally useful kitchen and competent brain when I start baking.  Everything just unmercifully falls apart.

Normally, I am a great cook.  I mean, heck, my first blog was for my recipes at Tamarah.org–

Come for the gluten free kids’ recipes, stay for the “20 Shades of Quinoa“!

Honestly, I just started that blog because I kept losing recipes I liked, and I was sick of the struggle.  I was tired of misplacing recipes, or forgetting which book they were in.  A blog has them all in one place!  BooYa!!

Now, I am no PioneerWoman BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION.  I try to organize the food so it looks nice in the photos, but I have crappy lighting and one or two really nice plates (for the most part).  So I don’t take Tamarah.org very seriously – it’s just for me, and if anyone is interested in the recipes, that’s totally cool.

So I feel pretty free to declare that I am not in the Competitive Food Business.

The holidays are competitive enough as it is: why would you go out of your way to make it harder??

Like these people.  Thanks guys.

1) Make An Olaf Pancake!

Are you kidding me.  An olaf pancake.  I’m happy if they are round.  End of pancake.

2) Make A Gourmet Christmas Cake!

credit…because this is not my cake.

 Cakes are not my strong point.

Cooking?  Yes.  Baking?  No.

I know I’m showing my hand here, but case in point…this was the last cake I made:

The way a good friend of mine put it: “It looks like a boob.”

I wouldn’t say that about the cake, myself. The baker though…very much, after this mess.

(The problem is I ran out of eggs and used egg replacer instead, and it fell apart.  And some other problems. Like gravity.)

3. Gingerbread Houses.

Nope.

What…

Oh come on!

I’m sure I have some resentment that my architectural skillz consist of getting 2 pieces of graham crackers to stand up at all…but honestly. If I got my house to even look remotely like this box, it would be monumental:

4) Appetizers.

How is that going to stay up…?

Braaaaiiiiinnnnnssss……

I kind of like this idea…

5) If you don’t have a “Nailed It” moment this Christmas, you just aren’t trying hard enough.

Listen, some people love to bake. Some people actually know what they are doing (and aren’t completely impatient) with crafts.

But if you haven’t “Nailed It” at least once, you just aren’t living life to its fullest.

With the biggest flops come the largest laughs…and laughter is the reason for the season, amiright?

Pintrosity. For the rest of us.

When I first began my Parentology journey, I thought Santa would be…fun.

Not that kind of fun.

Why wouldn’t it be?  You start on Christmas Eve when the family shares hot cocoa in front of a fire with the kids, as you read “The Night Before Christmas” together.  Once you are done, the children rush off to bed believing that Santa will traipse gingerly down the chimney to deliver hand-crafted gifts for very good little girls and boys in the middle of the night.

Come the brink of dawn, those bleary-eyed children will rustle you out of bed with shouts of squealing joy; and over a comforting cup of black coffee you get to watch your children marvel at the vision of brightly colored boxes on Christmas morning, excitedly scurrying in their new pajamas, finding the boxes with their names.

That’s how I thought it would happen.  It isn’t that ridiculous of an expectation, I don’t think.

What really happened was that my kids didn’t believe in Santa.  For years.

What a nice old man, sneaking into our home at night while we sleep!

Because it goes against everything we have taught them about strangers and making sure the house is locked at night to make sure robbers can’t get in (we have break-ins and house-robbery trouble in our town).

The idea that we would allow this guy named “Santa,” who we don’t actually know and isn’t family, to come into our house, while we were sleeping, and no one is concerned about this…made no sense to the kids, and they just didn’t buy it.

At all.

Because this is what they heard:

“Firefighters struggle to rescue trapped man in chimney in late-night burglary attempt.”

 So, on the plus side we still have our Christmas Eve traditions.  We do read “The Night Before Christmas” in front of a fire together.  We still leave the tree empty that night, and when we are absolutely sure the kids are sleeping, for serious, we fill it with the brightly colored presents, one of which is from this mysterious Santa person, that we have lovingly wrapped and wait for them to wake up in the morning and fill the house with only the joy a happy child can bring.

I don’t have a problem with introducing my kids to the mystery of Santa.  I think it is a fun tradition for kids, and it is certainly more fun now, as parents.  Naturally, we spin the Santa-thing a little more and not only give the children a gift from Santa, but also from Elvis, The President of the United States, Bugs Bunny, Mr. T…and whoever else we can think of.  The names are associated with the gift, so if it is a music CD, it is from Elvis; if it is a packet of tea seeds for a garden, it is from Mr. T; and so on.

Maybe the idea of Santa sneaking into the house was never fun, but our hand-crafted Christmas mornings have always been fun.

I don’t think Christmas traditions have ever really been set in stone, and they tend to change as times change.  So even though we don’t have the Norman Rockwell Christmas I expected when we first started Parentology, I think our dynamic traditions definitely fit our family the best.

And that kind of is the whole point of Christmas morning.

 No, we are not nobility.

I kind of love Gwyneth Paltrow.

There is something mesmerizing about her.  Something otherworldly.  Something…so completely out of touch with reality, I just can’t look away.  I flipped through her cookbook once, and honestly it wasn’t that bad.  I mean, granted, when she was talking about how much she loved apples, she was referencing an apple orchard she used to run through as a kid somewhere on the East Coast…Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard, or some epic place we have never heard of before; and furthermore, if I ever wanted to enjoy those apples, I would be arrested for touching sacred apples on sacred land.

But, she had some good recipes for apples in her sacred scrolls we refer to as a “cookbook,” so it’s not all bad.

On the other hand, I refuse to accept her as Pepper Potts, so there’s also that.

 Is this door gluten free? Because I can only touch gluten free doors.

The fact of the matter is that she is a hard working woman raising kids with her uncoupled husband, and really doing well for herself.  I can’t fault her for being successful.

However.

I am totally going to make fun of her Gift Guide.  Because it is pretty epic, in only an epic way GOOP could manage:

1) Easy Health  Angel Juicer,Gold – $5,000

GOOP Description : “Absurd, but awesome.”

My Description: I bought a juicer once, years and years ago. It was pretty expensive for me at the time ($80-ish?).  Turns out, I’m not a juice person. I used it a few times, but I was so underwhelmed with juice, I just walked away and didn’t clean it. So mold/fruit flies got in, and it never worked again. I’m just not that excited about juice.

Know what I am excited about? Purple Vespas that are worth $5,000

2) Travel Backgammon – $550

GOOP Description: “Hours of entertainment in one slick little case.”

My Description: I know when we are on a 14 hour road trip, there is no other game the kids will want to play in the backseat than backgammon.  When you are driving over the bumpy California highways, those little pieces stay right where they are supposed to be and no one gets so angry that they throw the board out the window! (that might be me. Not the kids.)  Ah, the hours and hours of my childhood playing backgammon.

No, actually…I have only played it once and then stopped because it is so mind-numbingly-boring.  Hours of entertainment??  Are you kidding??

The funniest part is this:

 If you scroll down her list, you can find this backgammon set for only $120! It’s a   steal!!

 3)  Indoor/Outdoor Foosball Table – $3,500

GOOP Description: “A total investment, but the kid in us can dream.”

My Description: This thing looks like it is made out of aluminum, and I guarantee you it is going to break before Christmas dinner is served.  The site describes it as, “An all-terrain foosball table for the all too-dedicated foosball competitor.”  Which means you can put this on your personal ice rink, you can bring it on your private Lear Jet, it can fit in your marble bathtub or you can set it up in the nanny’s quarters…because you certainly don’t want to be listening to this racket all night.

4) French/Spanish Bingo – $16

GOOP Description: “Why not mix it up?”

My Description: I’m a little confused. It’s only $16 and not plated in gold.  Is this for the kids?  Really. You are going to spend $16 on your kids. And it’s not gold plated.

I don’t get it.

Auch nahm ich Deutsch in der Schule, so dass dies nichts fur mich.

5) Bruder Toys Mack Granite Garbage Truck – $80 

GOOP Description: “It’s like toddler crack.”

My Description: This has to be the best one on her list. It’s just a plastic truck on Amazon, but “it’s like toddler crack.” Is this what blue collar workers get their kids?  $80 trucks?  It’s like going to Africa and buying the regional clay jars they use to make food, and putting it on your counter as art.  You’re kind of missing the point.  But the toddler is happy.  I mean, it’s crack.  Who isn’t happy on crack?

6) LEGO: Build the Maersk ‘Triple-E’ container vessel – $149 

GOOP Description: “This is for the advanced Lego tech.”

My Description: My kids are into Legos.  Show me one kid who isn’t.  But…I’m a little iffy on this choice.  A Maersk container vessel?  Not Star Wars, not castles, not something imaginative…a Maersk container vessel?  Nothing says “Mom doesn’t get Legos” like a Maersk container vessel.  No offense to Lego Corp.

7. McDonald’s Lid – $115

GOOP Description: “Tom Sachs tackles the McDonald’s coffee lid.”

My Description: I had to stare at this for a good, full 5 minutes to convince myself this was actually what I was looking at.

This is…a plate. Sculpted to look like a McDonald’s coffee lid.

I try not to get too butthurt about class wars, but this kind of stuff always bothers me.  The other day I was remembering about the day we visited Harvard.  It’s a hallowed place in America, and we were in the area: why not check it out.  So we took the family to a hamburger joint nearby, and they had the “Blue Collar Burger.”  This burger had nothing on it but a pickle, because blue collar workers can’t afford anything else.  I was so pissed off at this, it just drove me nuts.  I hate looking down your nose at people, whether they have money or not.  This kind of “art” that trivializes different classes will never sit well in my soul.  Off soapbox.

8) Lemon Cypress Tree – $39.95

GOOP Description: “A gift that literally keeps on giving.”

My Description: I just want to be clear that this is a cypress tree.  Not a lemon tree.  It is an evergreen tree that you can put on your table.

Soo, this tree doesn’t give you anything.

I literally can’t even.

Okay, let’s speed things up….

Clothes, House Accessories and a Thermos:

A custom painting of books. – $250

“So much fancier than a paper carton” – $12

It’s salt. Who gives a pound of salt for Christmas? – $18

Nail bangle – $7,600

“For mid-flight naps.” Because I can always sleep with my kids mid-flight. – $52

You can either wear this, or the blanket on the back of the couch. It’s up to you. – $3,190

 GOOP: “Not exactly flattering, but so good.” 

Sexy, flattering bathrobes are found at Trashy, anyway.

I know when I think about Christmas for my daughters, I think gold hot pants. – $54

It’s a glass jar. – $480

It’s something, that’s for sure. – $12,000

National State Park Thermos.  For Christmas. Another hard to beat gift. – $39.50 

and finally…. 

Rosebud. – $Priceless.

Yesterday was a partial solar eclipse.

We have done the pinprick in paper before, which worked out amazingly well, but I thought we’d amp up the intensity: find an astronomer and get them to let us play with their telescopes!  How hard can that be?

You’d be surprised how easy that was 🙂

So, over at my education-blog, BreakingOrbits, there is an Events page.  That page has a ton of links to Free things going on in the Bay Area.  Lo and behold, the City College of San Francisco was having a free event where you could play with the Astronomy department’s telescope!

No kidding!

So, off we went!

(I love homeschooling)

I love colleges.  I love colleges in the way 6 year old little girls love Princess Castles.  I love the design, I love the architecture, I love the over-the-top hugeness they put into the walkways.  (You should have seen my melting face when Ben took me to see Dartmouth.  Holy cow was that amazing.)  These stairs were huge, and I made the kids walk all the way up just so I could get a picture of them on the steps in front of the giant pillars and dome, and the gigantic words that say, “The Truth Shall Make You Free.”  I love colleges.  They are definitely where I belong.  I would love to go back and teach Literature classes there after the kids are all off on their own.

Thank you kids for letting Mom take this awesome picture 🙂

Okay, so here was where it was happening!  We walked all through the Science Hall, which was actually pretty neat to see.  They had a seismograph machine in the wall that was working, and that was amazingly awesome (and I got to explain what it was to some random guy walking by, because he said he never understood what it did! Awesome day for him!).  There were displays in the hallways, and one had whale vertebra, whale baleens, shells and microscopic pictures of marine amoeba.  I also got to bug a study hall asking if any of those fine gentlemen were the Astronomers we were looking for.  They waved their hand and said, “These are not the Astronomers you are looking for.”  They were pretty convincing, so we kept walking…and we finally found them!  They were outside, which made a lot more sense.

This guy was hanging out with some mylar, and you could look through the mylar and see the eclipse.

The kids all stood in line to wait their turn to look through the telescope.

This is Evan in the gray sweatshirt, and he was in charge of the telescope.  He was a very pleasant fellow, and we talked with him for a bit.  He was explaining how today was particularly interesting, because there was a gigantic sunspot that you could see today; so that made the eclipse a little more exciting!

When we were done, I figured we’d walk around and see what else the college had to offer.  Nova wanted to see the Art dept., so we headed over there.  We found the art gallery, which was fun for me.  I worked in a gallery at a college for a few years, and it was one of my favorite jobs.  So I loved being able to take the kids here and show them around.

We took a seat and I showed the kids the students’ paintings.  Had them tell me which ones were still lifes, which ones were portraits, etc.  Alice got really into it and found the “HORSIE!!!!!!”

I was trying to explain why Helvetica was so important, but I lost them on that topic.  Which is totally fair. However, if you are interested in typography, the documentary, “Helvetica,” is actually very interesting.

We were done walking around the college, and we had a little time to kill…so we went to the beach.  The kids know what to do 🙂

Okay, so I was at a stoplight when I saw this guy in the wild, writing.  May I just say that he found a fantastic place to write.  Noisy, busy, but no one is bothering you.   My hat off to you, fellow writer.

Life is good 🙂

Our home is usually very healthy. Sometimes a small cold here and there, but nothing overwhelming.

The past few weeks we each have taken turns running fevers and developing head colds.  Fortunately, it really isn’t that bad. It’s just a cold, it isn’t projectile vomiting or staying up all night with humidifiers, Vicks and on-call nursing staff.  It’s a cold…it’s just the neverending cold.  So I’m home from church with some of the girls, making homemade pizzas for lunch and using the free time to sanitize the house.

There is nothing like repetative tasks like scrubbing toilets that gets your mind wandering on weird things.

Like Frozen.

(perhaps the neverending movie?)

Remember a few days after Frozen came out, all of a sudden everyone was snarky about Elsa’s parents?  “They were actually horrible parents because they locked their poor daughter in a room, and she was incapable of living without them!  For shame.”

That has always bothered me, but I never understood why.  Well, now I have the time to figure it out!

First off, the desecrating of heroes has always bothered me.  They are heroes, but they are also human (for the most part..depending on your story).  I have a huge problem with how comfortable people are with hating others; it just drives me crazy.  I have listened to rants about why Abraham Lincoln was, actually, the “worst President evar.”  To which I say, “Wasn’t that over 150 years ago…so who cares??”  Mother Theresa was actually some monster in India.  Thomas Jefferson was a Theist, Winston Churchill was racist, Gandhi was evil, and Martin Luther was a leprechaun (citation needed).

There are good people in the world.  These good people are each individuals fighting their own fight, traveling their own travels, enjoying their own joys.  These people see the good in others and look to do good for others.

Okay, so this is totally a 1990s motivational poster kind of feel…but it’s true!  Good people will make you feel good.  Ben is a good person, and he makes me feel great.  My kids are good people, and they make me feel happy.  I am a good person, and I look to make them all feel loved and happy.  I mean, that is kinda the whole point of this life thing….there were 10 Commandments in the Old Testament.  What was Jesus’ New Commandment?

No, that’s not it.

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

(John 13:34-35 ESV)

The new commandment is to love.  When we demonize people, including heroes, it isn’t loving.  It’s judging.  It is saying, “oh sure, they might have done this one good thing, but that doesn’t make them a good person.”  One: yes it does.  Two: it doesn’t make you a good person tearing them down.  So knock it off.

Being loving means we care about each other.  We are concerned about each other.  We delight in our successes and we are bummed out when things don’t work the way we thought they would.

Even though the parents in Frozen were fictional, the backlash against them was very real.  It was real, and it stung, and I finally figured out why it bothered me.  Here is why:

They were special needs parents.  They didn’t have schools or doctors to help them learn how to support their daughter.  No one had ever seen powers like Elsa’s before, and they were doing the best they could with the complete lack of resources they had available.  They gave her tips on how to control her emotions.  They gave her love and support throughout her childhood.  They left the castle in her care when they did leave and assured her that she could do it.  They didn’t have a cure for it.  They didn’t have a support group to help them.  They didn’t have any idea of where it came from or what it meant for their child’s future: and they still kept positive and loving, to the end.

Those are good parents.

Just like every other parent with a special needs child, they struggled on their own.  They could see how hard life was going to be for their daughter, and it tore them up inside…but they found solutions and strength for their child.  They knew how different Elsa felt, and they made sure to love her unconditionally.

When you see a family with a special needs child, you are seeing 5 minutes of their day.  You aren’t spending the countless hours of taking care of their children, the hours/years of research trying to find better ways to help them, the endless nights telling yourself it will be okay.  Because you know it will be okay.  When you are the parent of a special needs child, no one else on earth loves that child more than you do…and you will fight to the death to do everything possible for them.

The backlash against Elsa’s parents always bothered me because they were parents of a special needs child.  If anything, watching Frozen should have made us think, “My goodness, those parents had it rough.  They did it all on their own!  I wonder if there are any parents of children with special needs around me who I could help.”

We should not be tearing parents down.  We should learn from this, and lift each other up.

Being a parent doesn’t mean you find all the answers.  I doubt it means you find most of the answers!

But it means you do it together.  That is love.

We picked up a bug a few weeks ago, and it isn’t entirely going away as quickly or as quietly as I would have liked.

First kid#3 , #5, #1 and #4 had a little fever.  It went away within a few days, so I thought that was it.  But then kid#3 and kid#5 got it back with a vengance for a few days. Then we woke up feeling a little off…and the next day I had a fever, and I’m still feeling run down.  #3 finally got it yesterday, plus he has completely lost his voice, which is hilarious for me since I have lost my voice every single time I even get the tiniest sore throat throughout my entire life.

So, we’re  all recovering slowly.  Fortunately we don’t have the flu or anything…just a cold hard enough to knock us off our feet.

The thing about colds, or just feeling under the weather for any reason, is that you can get cranky.

Hey, you got a fever there.

Just ask Ben. I may, or may not, have been unreasonably cranky on Sunday night.

Thankfully, Monday morning came around and I at least felt a little bit better and apologized profusely for it, and he was fine.  Granted, it was his turn that afternoon to run the cranky mill, so I got to give him the same grace he gave me.  You have to take care of each other through cold season.

But with kids, they don’t have the experience to know they are cranky when they are sick.  They just know they aren’t feeling well, and they think the world is falling apart because you put their orange cup in the dishwasher and they have to wait for it to finish washing in order to get it back, and they wanted water in that orange cup.

Really, these things matter when kids are sick.  You can’t anticipate everything that is going to bug them, and I don’t condone catering to their every whim…but everyone needs some grace when they’re sick.  Especially kids.

So, kid#1 was just feeling a little crabby this morning while we were reading Jane Eyre, which is kind of understandable because chapter 4 is like, a million pages long.  It is interesting to me, but the kids are zoning out halfway through.  By the end of the chapter, I noticed that kid#1 is starting to retreat a little…which is what I do when I don’t feel well.

Retreat!

What I did once I saw this was I told her to go take a break. Get some water and some lunch.  Meanwhile, I got all some ingredients out.

All of us girls put on our aprons (the boys took a break with Minecraft) and we got to work on making meatballs!  This got us working together, talking and making something that we could enjoy later.  She felt significantly better after we connected, and we’re back to normal.

You don’t need to do something really big in order to connect with your kids, and it doesn’t take much to make it matter.  It doesn’t have to be a big deal like taking them to Disneyland.  All these little times are going to be the ones they remember the most.  They are going to say, “Remember that afternoon when we made pineapple meatballs?  Those were great!”

–>  Recipe! <–

Cold season is coming up.  Have a few of these little tricks under your belt for when you need them 🙂

Here are some ideas off the top of my head:

• Make chicken homemade noodle soup together
• Make drop biscuits and eat with pumpkin butter
• Make sugar cookies
• Make a giant pot of tea with their choice of tea
• Make pudding together
• Bake a loaf of banana bread
• If you really want to be crazy, share a can of sardines and sweet potato crackers with them…that’ll spice up the day 😉

For the record, kid#1 and kid#2 finished the can for me…it was that awesome.