• column,  holidays,  Laugh,  Life,  parenting

    Is Santa Real?

    The question, Is Santa Real, rings through the holiday season with the Christmas carols, and just like the icicles hanging from our rooftops, sends a shiver down our spines. We can stall, ignore or sugarcoat our answers; however these futile attempts to side-step the issue rarely satisfy the insatiable curiosity of a child.

  • Life,  the lake house,  Try This

    I once thought Lincoln Logs were natural toys

    We were reluctantly roped into this adventure by an unrelenting 5-year-old, that spent a little too much time looking at the suspiciously hand-drawn (note that the author had no actual pictures) of 3-d sculptures made from sticks and moss in the book Nature’s Art Box. By the end of two hours, however, each one of us were privately engulfed in a world that revealed the challenges that architects and engineers must face daily, with a fleeting glimpse into the magical world of miniature, where toads, bugs and maybe fairies habitat our world right along beside us. “I wonder who just might live here?” Certainly not a frog, I was reminded;…

  • clean,  Laugh,  Life,  memories,  parenting

    The Laughing Cow Lives In My Heart

    One of the benefits of being a Mom, is to be the recipient of stuff like this red cow, which is really a bull. (As my kids have corrected me no less than 12 times): The gift is not in the bull, although, I do love it; it’s in the latent, crazy, quirky reminiscent memories from my past, that would still be buried if I didn’t have the bull today. Memories that my 9-year-old’s soul is completely, blissfully, oblivious to. Yet, how did he know this cow would resonate with me? The red on this cow is stunning. A true red that stands in contrast to the organgey-brown-colored reds we…