Rag curls always remind me of A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. In the movie I used to watch as a girl, Sara has her hair tied up in rags when she finds out her father is dead and she is to work as a servant girl at Miss Minchin’s school for girls. I had always wanted to try ragging my daughter’s hair, and a few months ago, I decided to search it on youtube. I was not disappointed. There were dozens of how-to videos, and within a week, I got the process down pretty well.

Of the videos I saw, however, I didn’t see many that focused very well on the actual rolling-up process, which is why I decided to make my own.

Hold on to your hats, kids. This is the very first video I have ever posted on sophistimom. I am neither a talented film maker, nor do I know how to use iMovie—I didn’t add any music or text, so what you see is what you get.

Maybe one of these days I’ll sit down with my kids so they can show me how to edit a movie, but until then, I can at least show you how to make some rag curls. They’re a lot of fun, cheap, and perfect for the holidays.

My son is made out of rubber bands. I think.

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Every summer when I was a kid, the neighborhood girls—which consisted of Caitlin, Amy, and myself—were always scheming up some sort of business. One year there was a magic show, which starred my brother Josh, his buddy Seamus, and me and the girls wearing leotards cast off from Amy’s former dance recitals. What nice neighbors and parents we all had—that they would actually come and sit on the yard to the side of my house and watch our last minute production. Oh, and pay us for it, too.

Though I can’t remember any particular lemonade stands, I’m sure we had many. And I just want to thank everyone who bought something from us.

I think anyone who buys crappy lemonade from a sticky nine-year-old will get a wing added to their mansion in heaven. If anyone thinks this country has lost its humanity, then I say, look around at all the lemonade stands. How many people, solely for the purpose of doing a good deed, plunk down their money, stare into little eager faces, shove any germaphobic tendencies aside, and gulp down a paper cup full of lukewarm Kool-Aid?

That, my friends, is altruism.

My kids have wanted to have their own lemonade stand since . . . oh, since they were born. But I was always a chicken about it. We either didn’t know our neighbors well, or the street was too busy, or who knows what else? There were always excuses. Apparently, the phrase “err on the side of caution” is tattooed on my prefrontal cortex. I just can’t over the idea that life isn’t as safe as it was for me and the neighborhood girls when we were peddling Girl Scout cookies. So I always hesitate.

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I’m still finding chocolate fingerprints around the house. My three lovelies (what I affectionately call my kids on the best of days) came into my room—not too early—on Mother’s Day morning with this for breakfast: a grapefruit, warm water with honey and lemon, and strawberries with chocolate ganache. We added the bananas later when the strawberries started to run out. How’s that for kids that know their mommy? They’ve learned that my favorite breakfasts are ones that are less like breakfast and more like dessert.

I was then flooded with a series of drawings, pop-up cards, and poems, along with these potted gerbera daisies, which were provided by my mother-in-law. I don’t like saying “ex-mother-in-law”—it sounds too harsh. For two years now, she had taken the kids for an evening, the week before Mother’s Day, to give me the night off, and lead my kids in creating some sort of extravaganza for me.

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In high school, I spent many an afternoon at my friend Colby’s house. In a bright corner of her home, her mom used to grow grass in a shallow pot perched on a beautiful pedestal every spring. Colby said it was for their Easter baskets. At that very moment, I decided I would always use real grass in my own kids’ (yet to be born) Easter baskets.

Well, through years of living in apartments with not-so-sunny windows, and then three years in a house where I learned that I couldn’t grow a dandelion if I tried, and then back to an apartment with no sun at all, my well-intentioned hope chest dreams have turned into plastic strands of pink and purple easter grass, choked up in swirling vacuums.

Still, every year, in the back of my head, I think, Darn, why didn’t I grow real grass for their baskets this year? To which I respond, Oh, yeah, my apartment has no sun/I kill plants/my apartment still has no sunlight.

This year, though, I had a breakthrough. I discovered our health food store sells wheat grass for juicing. Now, I probably noticed it years ago, but it wasn’t until this year that I remembered I could use it for something other than a power shake.

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It was an Exedrin kind of day.

But 3:00 is my point of no return, and if I don’t pop a few by then, I’m on my own.

I was on my own today. With three kids. At a children’s museum.

I must have been temporarily insane. When I am in my right mind, I don’t volunteer to go to children’s museums—especially not on national holidays.

Of course, a day like today wasn’t about me. It was about the kids, and they did have a good time once we got through the line at the entrance.

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I’ve never been on a nature walk with my kids. At least, not near where we live.

If I had to give a reason, the best I could tell you is that here in the west, I don’t feel at home. I miss the beaches of New England. I miss the woods I grew up in, with ponds and skipping rocks. I miss drinking in the smell of earth and  burning pine until I think my lungs will pop. I miss the leaves. I miss the ocean.

The desert and mountains in Utah are beautiful, but it’s not the same thing. Nature here makes me homesick.

But on Monday, after I dropped my kids off at school, my four-year-old and I got out of the car, and a perfect fall day was about to swallow us in one cool breeze. The sun was shining, while storm clouds lazily collected in pockets of sky. I could not take him inside to sit at home and watch Sesame Street while I worked. And so I decided to take a nature walk with him—here in the Rocky Mountains.

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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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