She Laughs at the Days

"I told you to do something about the weapons all over the floor of your room," I reminded him, "and the clean laundry is still piled on your chair. You need to put it away." "But I didn't put the laundry there," he complained, his tone betraying deep self pity, "Somebody else did." And then my head exploded, shot off my neck, spun around the room like a balloon deflating, and as it came back to rest I heard myself say these words. "I'm so sorry that I picked up your clothes for you and walked them all the way to your bedroom from the laundry room so that you wouldn't have to make those extra steps yourself and that all you had to do was to place the clothes that I washed and folded for you into the proper places in your drawers. What was I thinking trying to make your life easier by bringing you your clean laundry? What was I thinking, washing it and folding it for you? I am so sorry for the inconvenience it has caused you

Bam Bam has recently discovered his boy parts, in that way that makes diaper change time into magical play time. A little boy plays with his ball Parenting books do not tell you that your boy child will, from birth, occasionally have a response that makes a mother feel the need to clarify the nature of her arrangement with her infant son. "Whoa there little dude! Don't get too excited. It's just a diaper change." (They don't tell you about little girls trying to insert things in places that they shouldn't be aware of yet either.) At first they think it's just a random phenomenon. But then comes the day when they reach down there and grab in just the right spot and a grin of pleasure cracks over their little face as they realize they can make this feeling happen with their own two hands! From that day on woe betide any attempt to tear asunder that which has been joined together. To remove said hands from the nether regions and fasten a diaper once

I'm going to apologize for not updating all week by telling you what I was doing, now it's done. You may remember that at The Charis Solution Benefit Concert we had last November we had a couple of comedians perform in between musical sets. The whole concert was fantastic and the comics were hysterical and so we thought we had a magical combination going on and thought we would host a series of Comedy Night Fundraisers this summer. (Parts of the livestream worked and are worth watching. These guys were so funny. It's really amazing that they came and performed for us.) Which is where I start to learn that I actually know nothing about what goes into making such a thing successful. You guys, the learning curve since I started this non-profit thing , always so steep. So, things I learned last week. Comedians work hard! They spend a lot of time honing their craft and sometimes it's like heavy lifting to get a crowd to laugh. The guys we had come were amazing

Dad's take you higher In Aaron's post A Big Enough Story , that I linked to last week, he concludes by asking what sorts of things we can do as parents to push back horizons and expand the universe for our children. (It makes me so happy that the man I love is the kind of guy who works his butt off to give his kids a big huge story so that they will not be satisfied with pleasures too small.) And catch you when you come down And send you right back up again, higher than before. That got me thinking about my dad. There is one thing my dad consistently did, and still does, my whole entire life that when I think about it as an adult is sort of awe inspiring. Ever since I was a little girl I remember my dad giving people a place to stay. He built a little partition in the basement so that people he met who had nowhere to sleep for the night could have a semi private place to crash at our house. Essentially he took in homeless people. Not everyone, but he was al

How one parents seems to be directly linked to ones expectations of parenting, family life, and the world in general. You may have noticed it. A parent will talk about the sibling fighting, the way they are mean to each other, in a tone that betrays that this is just how they expect things to be, siblings fight with each other and are cruel, and that's life. At some point you realize that they think that's the only way for things to be because that's been their only experience of things. They feel the truth that just telling them to stop it won't really make any difference. Or there's the mother who expects her 14 year old daughter to be promiscuous, and talks about it in terms of how to avoid her getting pregnant . She talks that way because that is her reality, and that's the only reality she knows. She knows that her children won't do what they are told not to do because she knows she didn't obey when she was that age. Why should she expect th

As promised here , I will now share my recipes for the best cakes ever, maybe. To begin with I should explain something. I have hardly ever fully invented a cake recipe. I usually start with a really delicious cake recipe that someone else made and then alter it beyond all recognition. That's allowed in baking by the way. Changing ingredients until you have what you really want. (There was a time when I would have posted this on my food blog, but I haven't been there in so long, and I'm actually wondering how I can just import it into this one and create a seperate food section. Feel free to let me know how I can do this in the comments if you know.) About 5 years ago Aaron discovered this recipe for Italian Cream Cake . All hail the internet for yielding old family recipes at the click of a button. I bet if you just followed the recipe to the letter this cake would be delicious. Not that we ever have. We just can't help it. We tweak things, and the tweak some mo

There's a bit of a wedding theme going on over at Like Mother, Like Daughter right now. That may have something to do with the fact that Sukie and Deirdre are both marrying within a few short months of each other. So it seems appropriate to tell you about the wedding cakes I just recently made. A friend of a friend somehow was without a cake just a short week before her daughter's wedding. So she emailed her friends asking if anyone could put together a cake for her, which was then passed on to me because people remember when you do stuff like decorate wedding cakes. So I said yes, only partly because she was paying, because, really it's not worth it if I don't enjoy it, but every penny helps now that my second born is also in need of extensive orthodontia. She had purchased cake mixes, which would have made it easy, but I just couldn't bring myself to make a cake that didn't actually taste good. So I went the much more time consuming and expensive, and p