Several years ago, when my oldest son was a baby and we lived in Hawaii, I spent most of my free time drooling over the photographs in Martha Stewart Living. I knew once we moved back to the mainland, I would entertain people in a way that would make Martha proud.

When we got back, I got to work. I gathered pieces for baking and serving as I went along: cake pedestals, cookie cutters, a kitchen torch. As we hosted small dinner parties, I soon realized how expensive it was, and soon after that started to wonder what all the fuss was about. Though I loved trying to create something lovely, I knew most of my friends didn’t really care what I did; they just wanted to get together. Eventually, I was asking myself why I needed to impress anyone.

It’ll take a few hours of therapy to get to the bottom of that question. But I did come to one solution: I stopped worrying about entertaining friends and decided to turn to my own family and create something beautiful for them.

Sometimes it was dinner for two: fillet mignon with matchstick fries and shallot sauce. Other times it was something the kids would love on a snow day, like hot chocolate affogatos. I liked to find ways to celebrate and show the people around me that I loved them.

In my head, of course, was this vision of once a week having the whole family dress for dinner and eating with the best china and silver. But I haven’t gotten around to that yet. If I ever get nice china and silver, I’ll let you know how that turns out.

Anyway, you know my story. Somewhere between the fillet mignon and the chocolate affogatos, my marriage went to poop.

And things are still spinning around here. Sometimes I feel like everything is fine and forget for a few moments that someone in this world hates my guts, and other times I remember that fact and want to go to every matinee of Avatar and drown my sorrows in a huge bag of Almond Joy Pieces (Have you tried these yet? They’re like M&Ms with coconut in them. Sorry, Connie. Not for you).

While I wait for things to settle out, I have decided to get on with my dreams. I will be making a beautiful life for my family anyway. For we have plenty to celebrate.

Last week, we celebrated the end of winter. After school, we piled some chicken hand pies into a tin bread box, and stuffed a hot brick wrapped in kitchen towels beside them to keep them warm. My four-year-old brought out a tiny lunch box, which we filled with raspberry jam bars. Then we raced to the mountains and arrived just as the sun hid itself behind the western peaks at Sundance Resort.

While freezing our little fingers off, I said in tones of strained patience things like: “Mommy needs pictures of you—no don’t make that face” or “The sooner I take these pictures, the sooner we can go get warm” and “That’s funny, but please try to look more natural.”

When our picnic by the fire was over, we went inside to order hot chocolate—wicked expensive hot chocolate. (I’m from Boston, so I am actually authorized to use “wicked” as an intensifier every now and then. Sundance, by the way, always hosts some celebrity or another.  Apparently these are the people who can regularly afford wicked expensive hot chocolate. On this trip, it was Wayne Brady, in case you were dying to know). While inside, we got warm, took more pictures, and celebrated being together.

This new chapter in our lives is not what I planned all those years ago, while reading my magazines in a tiny apartment in Kona, but it is so much better, because I am entertaining my own family.  I know now, more than ever before, why that is a perfect reason to celebrate.

Of course, Vizzini said Plato was a moron, but Vizzini wasn’t any good at fencing, so what did he know?

My 10-year old has been begging me to do fencing for months now.  We started with a little introductory class back in the fall, and ever since that was over, I have been nagged constantly.  The great thing is, he completely appreciates it, and not only that, he has jumped in with both feet.

His coach keeps telling him how brave he is for participating, whether it is standing up against teenagers in class, or going to his first competition last Saturday.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bet you’re all wondering where I’ve been. I really have no excuse, other than the new place I moved into has almost no natural light, which means that taking pictures of food here has been a real problem.

But I’m working on it, and soon we’ll all be happy again. In the meantime, while I figure out what to do with lighting, I wanted to open a discussion on how to end pickiness at the dinner table.

You all know I want my kids to eventually have some degree of sophistication when it comes to eating, and nothing shouts bad manners louder than someone who turns his or her nose up at something served for dinner (Tripe and sweet breads, of course, being the obvious exceptions to this. I believe those and other similar cuisine entitles the one served to get up and run as far away from the dinner table as possible).

My daughter is about as picky as they come. She won’t eat pasta. Ever. This includes noodles of all kinds and in all cuisines.

So here is a list of techniques, suggestions, philosophies, etc. that I try to use. I’m not uber consistent, so maybe by writing it down, I’ll start to be better about the whole thing, and one day my three little lovelies will be as unpicky as I am.

1. Be as consistent as you can. This is sometimes very hard, as life is insane for everyone.   But if at all possible, try to serve meals at the same time every day. My grandmother used to actually serve the same meals every week: spaghetti on Wednesday, franks and beans on Saturday (unless it was summer, then she served crab), some sort of roast on Sunday, etc.

2. Don’t force anything on them. I think this may actually be the reason my 6-year-old still won’t eat pasta. I may or may not have possibly made her eat some once. Maybe. Either way, I learned it isn’t such a good idea. The best thing to do is just put out the meal and say, “This is what I have made. You may choose to eat it, or you may choose not to eat it, but I am not making anything else. Out next meal will be tomorrow morning at 7:00.”

3. Parents decide when and what to serve, children decide if and how much they will eat. That line, or something close to it, came from a book I read in college with a title like How to Keep Your Kid from Getting Fat (I tried finding it on amazon, and couldn’t, but it was something like that). If you consistently follow this rule, the power struggle should eventually go away.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve mentioned Nathan a couple times before. He is my friend from when we were missionaries for our church in Quebec. His latest book Calamity Jack, the sequel to Rapunzel’s Revenge (both written by Shannon Hale and her husband Dean Hale), hits shelves in a couple of weeks. My son, who has been enamored by Nate’s blog, recently interviewed him about his career.

Nate, the cool illustrator that he is, didn’t just answer the questions, he turned the whole interview into a comic series. Click here to read the first one. Then you can keep going back to his blog everyday to see his latest post in the interview.

Read the rest of this entry »

Life has a way of lurching forward whether we stop to realize it or not.

Brooke and I had been planning this picnic for — oh, I don’t know, a million and one weeks. Amidst our crazy summer, that for some strange reason seemed to be filled with never ending days and weeks, was the hope of something fun and simple and perfect.

But coming up with something beautiful in the midst of chaos is a tall task, one I barely had the creative energy for.

Have you ever had a friend that doesn’t just reach out a hand when you’re struggling, but stops to carry you? In our life right now, we have several such friends, and Brooke is one of them.

She was the reason our picnic was wonderful.   She has a talent of making everything she sees or touches beautiful and full of life.

When we met at the mountains, Brooke’s sense of style and creativity overwhelmed me. Her children looked like they had stepped out of a modern Norman Rockwell painting, and the lunches she prepared were the epitome of old fashioned Americana.

Within each basket was nestled a sandwich to satisfy the most ravenous sweet tooth, a vintage book, confetti corn, and a root beer.

As Brooke and I ate our salads and chatted, the children wandered and played.  They were so content feeding corn on the cob to the lucky fish in the pond, we practically had to chase them down to feed them dessert.

As the afternoon rambled on, she and I shared our hopes and dreams for the future, and I was grateful we took the time to spend one last perfect moment together at the end of a very long summer.

To read more about the lovely and talented Brooke, be sure to click here and read her post of our picnic.

Her post made me cry.

I didn’t realize until tonight that I started my blog exactly one year ago Sunday! It may not be that significant a milestone for many people who keep blogs, but for me, it has been a huge milestone.

Bear with me a moment as I get a bit personal without spilling too much (I imagine I will be spilling a bit more in the coming months).

A year ago, I started this blog as a way to express some of my interests and talents, hoping I would one day be able to see it grow into something more. Any of my expectations for readership were far surpassed in my first few months of blogging, and I was thrilled to see my stats on Google Analytics sky rocket in such a short time. It was in those beginning weeks I gained some of my most loyal readers.

Then in early October, my personal life was turned upside down (sorry I can’t really elaborate at this point, I can be more open about it in a future post), and blogging became very difficult. I want to say to all my loyal readers, who bore with me through the fall and winter, THANK YOU. I know there were weeks when I didn’t have much to share, but you came anyway, and I really appreciate that.

In the spring, I guess I got my second wind, because I was able to post more. That was also when my brother and I started to come up with the new look and feel of the blog, and the rest, of course, you can see before you.

I have grown in so many ways in the last year. Amidst my darkest days, I have felt the true love of friends, which has helped me carry on. Though I don’t know most of you, my readers, personally, your comments have helped keep me afloat in the most challenging time of my life. And because of that, this year has also been one of the most rewarding.

So, thank you! To everyone. I hope we have many more wonderful years to come, as we share with each other ideas on how to make our families well-read, well-bred, and well-fed.

big smooches,
Jaime

Anyone want to take a whack at the definition?  It’s quite simple, and I imagine you’re all dealing with it in a heavy dose of it in your summer vacationing children right now.

Write your answer to the definition in the comment section, and then, let us know:  What are you all doing to overcome taedium (ted-ee-oom) during your summer break at your house?

At ours today, we took turns spraying each other with the hose.  Certainly not Disneyland, but we all feel much better.

I have never read, nor seen the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, but My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn is based on it.  I thought this line from the play really captures my view of what good etiquette is all about.

Remember when I was talking about Latin being the language of the enlightened? Well, for awhile now, I’ve been wanting to enlighten us all by adding a little to our vocabulary.

My first Latin word of the week is an easy one, and appropriate for this week.

Now everyone say libertas, lee-bare-tahs. Very good.

And Happy Independence Day.