I live in the middle of a desert, with endless weeks stretching ahead before I can reasonably hope for a cool breeze.  And yet, today, the heavens winked in my direction.  It rained in torrents for at least an hour and swept in a cool dry breeze.  I felt for the remainder of the afternoon, that I was living one of the lovely summer days we have on occasion in Massachusetts.

To add pleasure to perfection, I had the opportunity to interview Katie Brown of PBS’s The Katie Brown Workshop on the phone today.  She is incredibly real, funny, and open, and loves so many of the same things I love. It was like talking to a best friend, or even a sister.

At one point in our chat, she described one of her viewpoints as sounding “traditional and geeky.” We must be kindred spirits.

She is in New York this week, promoting a campaign sponsored by Splenda to donate $50,000 to Meals on Wheels, plus an extra $5,000, in what they are calling the “Apple Pie Initiative“.  Since the Fourth of July, Katie, Splenda, and Meals on Wheels teamed up to deliver thousands of slices of pie to some of the nation’s hungry.

If you would like to help with this cause, you can participate by sending slices of virtual pie to your friends on facebook. If 25,000 pie slices are sent through cyberspace by Labor Day, Splenda will donate an additional $5,000 to Meals on Wheels. So don’t hesitate to create a virtual pie, and send it along to all your friends  (By the way, that blackberry mascarpone tart, is my little virtual pie for all of you, and if you want the recipe, click here).

After a long day of being on Good Morning America, and attending to other business in the media, she was kind enough to let me interview her on the phone. I confess it felt less like an interview, and more like we were gabbing on a lunch break.

We talked about Meals on Wheels first, a charity that delivers food to people who are sick or living in shelters, and seniors with limited mobility. She discussed how happy it makes her to get behind a cause she believes in so strongly.

She loves what her friend Mario Batali says—that hunger is the one disease we can cure.

After we discussed the important business, we got to talking about all kinds of things.  I’ll share a few of the things that stood out, since if I tell you everything, I’ll be typing all night.

Katie grew up in Michigan, and one of the things she relishes most about her childhood is the time she spent outdoors in the “Four seasons of beautifulness” that was all around her there.  She said her connection to Mother Nature and the earth gave her grounding and a centeredness.  She hopes she can pass on a similar love of nature to her daughters.

She wants to teach her children to dream big, lofty dreams, to take a big bite out of life, and not be intimidated, yet at the same time maintain a sense of being in the world but not of the world.

Katie has had several cookbooks published and said it is her favorite thing she gets to do in her career.

As talented a chef as she is, what I love about her is she is quick to share she isn’t above taking shortcuts to get dinner on the table. She loves things like bagged salad and coleslaw mix.

She has inspired me to be more organized. She was not born organized (like me), but says how essential it is to being a successful working mom.

Katie is one of those people who has gained wisdom through striving to have a fully realized life. Now if I could just spend the next few years as her shadow, I could learn all I need to know.

My family moved to Massachusetts when I was six, and after awhile, my parents would chide my brother and me for being “afraid of getting our hands dirty.” Prior to that, we lived in rural Connecticut and practically lived in the dirt.  Josh and I made countless mud pies, roasted marshmallows in the back yard, picked huckleberries in the woods, and spent all our time outdoors.

I am sad sometimes that my own kids aren’t as lucky to grow up where I did. Even after we moved to Massachusetts, we still roamed the woods and spent a lot of time outside. We always spent part of the summertime pacing beaches, looking for shells and sea glass.

Lately, I have been looking for ways to help my kids “get their hands dirty.”  I want them to learn the value of hard work. To know what nature is, and to feel comfortable there.

So when my friend left me in charge of picking the vegetables and berries from her garden while she and her family is on vacation, I jumped at the chance.  She is a wonderful gardener (as opposed to me, who believes in gardens but have never successfully grown anything for longer than three weeks).  I wanted to teach my kids how fun it is to be in the soil, to have the satisfaction of picking a perfect berry, or an enormous squash (and as I said, they would never know that satisfaction if it it’s up to me).

She warned me it would be a hard job. But I can’t see how sneaking around in someone else’s neatly planted rows of cucumbers, blackberries, currants, zucchini, and tomatoes—at liberty to pick whatever I want like it’s a produce shopping spree—could be difficult, much less fair.

I’ll admit, it gets a bit hot out there, and one of the kids got stung by a bee (remedied quickly by the remaining drop of hydrocortisone cream in our first aid kit), but overall, it’s been fun. The kids have loved getting their hands dirty. Yesterday they had their own game of whose tomato/blackberry/green bean tasted best. The winner was awarded another tomato/blackberry/green bean.

I have been posting recipes throughout the week on babble. Be sure to take a peek at the blackberry soup, fresh tomato sauce, and zucchini cupcakes with maple cream cheese frosting.

And a HUGE thank you, JoLene. This has been fantastic.

The moment I met Shannon, I wanted to be her friend. The moment I saw her house, I wanted to be her.

She and her husband have been working on this little house in the middle of a city, lovingly finishing each detail. From the trim, to the fireplace, to the transom windows, every little thing is perfect in its own right. Outside, they have a workshop, a garden, chickens, and a tree house. They have created this beautiful balance of city living and the simplicity of the country.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.