I am seriously bummed for two reasons: 1. Our wonderful friends are on their way home to Atlanta after a fun-filled week and we’re going to miss them. 2. I really wanted to send them on their way with these little Road Trip Travel Packs from Polkadot Prints (via Design Mom). But I just couldn’t [...]

Do you have Olympic Fever at your house? We definitely do. I’m seeing Olympic rings everywhere, even in the craft tape Lily got for her birthday!
When you watch the athletes perform their amazing feats are you inspired to get moving, to push yourself harder?
The thing is, most of us don’t have hours to spend working [...]

We’re on to England! Which means a week of watching the Olympics for glimpses of castles and cathedrals between events; chuckling over the names of traditional foods like bubble and squeak, jam roly-poly, spotted dick, and bangers and mash; and reading some of our favorite English stories. And I’m sure we’ll fit in at least [...]

Have you ever traveled to a place that really got under your skin? So much so that when you got home you found yourself looking for somewhere close by that would help you recapture the experience?
That was definitely the case for me when we returned from China. We’d spent three weeks there when we went [...]

I’m so excited because today we get to spend the afternoon with two of my oldest and dearest friends and their families. One of them I see quite often because she lives just an hour away in Northfield, but the other one I only get to see every couple of years because she lives in [...]

“There were days when she would take an aimless ride in a rickshaw, immersing herself in the choreographed commotion of the streets, where banners in bold Chinese characters waved down through shafts of sunlight, advertising sales, silks, mah-jongg sets, live birds, ivory. She found Shanghai to be ‘a great sprawling rambling’ place filled with beautiful [...]

Every summer a kind soul gives us some rhubarb and we enjoy a pan of homemade strawberry-rhubarb crisp. It’s never occurred to me to buy any additional rhubarb, so I’ve never made anything else. So when we got a second batch from the CSA, I dug through my cookbooks to find something new to make.
I found [...]

I’m afraid Australia got the short end of the stick last week since we were so busy preparing for Lily’s birthday party. But we did manage to make Australian meat pies, eat Wiley Wallaby Liquorice, and watch Babe and The Rescuers Down Under. (I cobbled together the meat pies by combining a bunch of different [...]

Today is Lily’s eighth birthday. I asked her what she’d like to do for her actual birthday (she had her party last Friday) and she said, “Go to the beach.” So this afternoon we swimsuited up and headed for our town’s little beach on the St. Croix River.
As I sat at the water’s edge watching [...]

When I hung up our Matisse-inspired art projects I finally remembered to make museum art labels. I saw this idea in an article called “How to Be More Creative” by A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically and Drop Dead Healthy. The article was full of good insights like “brilliance is a numbers game” and “make an appointment with [...]