Here is a collection of my favorite recipes, the tried and true. Some appear on our table weekly, some just once or twice a year on special occasions, but none of them ever let me down. I’ll be adding more, so please check back if you need ideas!
Main Dishes
Aunt Karna’s Stuffed Shells
Neopolitan Casserole
Grandma Charlotte’s Pork [...]

I meant to make these Wee Mouse Tin Houses as gifts this past Christmas. I really did. I even bought fabric. A week before Christmas. Needless to say, the mice didn’t get made. But there’s always Christmas 2013, right?
Except that after surviving the holidays the last thing I want to do is start thinking about [...]

{Richie Designs }

One of the biggest challenges for me in blogging is to only post once a day! There are so many ideas to discuss, strategies to ponder, and books and projects and recipes to share. But this blog is meant to be a sketchpad for ideas and a place to organize thoughts and plans for living [...]

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We had quite an exciting morning. To make a long story short, there was a very minor issue at our local nuclear power plant during the night. We got an early-morning phone call from the powers-that-be asking us to keep our kids home until we knew the problem had been fixed. Soon after, [...]

We’ve been making homemade butter for Thanksgiving since Andrew was a wee lad. It’s super easy—all you need is a pint of heavy whipping cream, a dash of salt, a mason jar (or any container that has a very tight seal), and three marbles. Pour the whipping cream into the mason jar, add the marbles [...]

Christmas can be nuts. As my husband points out, I try to do a year’s worth of activity in four weeks. But what could I cut out? I love the traditions, the gift-making, the shopping, the baking, the parties, the concerts. So my only hope for as little stress as possible is to have a [...]

Happy Halloween! Tim and I managed to pull our costumes together in time for our friends’ annual Pole Barn Halloween Bash on Saturday. Here’s what we did (and a few things we’ll do differently if we wear these costumes again):

For Paul Bunyan, Tim wore a flannel jacket, jeans, and his Elmer Fudd hat. He had Important [...]

Yesterday Will was reminiscing about something that happened in his “late sevens.” (He’s in his “late eights” now.) Which reminded me that I need to remember to write things down. We all think we’ll remember every interesting tidbit of our days, but new things keep squishing out the old. There’s only so much room in [...]

One of the most valuable tools I use to maintain my life and sanity is a Daily Routine. I learned about Daily Routines from FlyLady years ago. FlyLady is the nickname of Marla Cilley, a southern lady who struggled with her own housekeeping issues and then created a website to provide help to others after [...]