I’ve always thought that fall ends more abruptly than the other seasons. Winter slowly melts into spring, spring warms its way into summer, and summer fades into fall. But the winter edge of fall has always seemed sharp to me. When leaves that shimmered overhead one day would crunch beneath my feet the next, when…
I have never really appreciated pie the way I should. But it is not entirely my fault. I wasn’t exposed to great pie making as a kid. My mom wasn’t into pie, and my grandmother, who, I am told, was a great pie maker in her day, grew a tad lazy in her later years….
“When you draw something, you get closer to it and know it better.” –Jim LaMarche Even before I put my colored pencils to paper, this statement resonated with me. It just made sense. It made so much sense in fact that I found myself buying notebooks and colored pencils and telling the kids we were…
Soren was wondering why we live in Iowa. There are no mountains, oceans, or deserts. None of the things that we travel to see. He wondered if that could be the reason: “Do we live in Iowa so we have a reason to travel to the ‘cool’ places?” “No,” I told him, “we live in…
I came across something I wrote five years ago on Valentine’s Day that included this gem of a conversation between then seven-year-old Bridger and five-year-old Landon: “Is God married?” Bridger wondered with a giggle. He considered this a very funny and bold kind of question. But it didn’t faze his brother. Landon leaned back, put…
A squiggle is a quick and easy art prompt. A wiggle is an equally quick and easy writing prompt. When James, from Story Warren, made plans to publish my articles about squiggles and wiggles, he quipped that a trilogy would be fun and wondered if I had any idea what a giggle might be. A…
All the fun we had with Squiggles (read all about it here) led to the creation of something else–the cousin of the Squiggle, affectionately known as the Wiggle. I picked up the basic idea at a writer’s circle but came up with the name Wiggle myself. You see, it is like a Squiggle–kind of–but involves…
A few years ago, I was looking for a creative challenge that would appeal to all my kids, ranging at the time from age six to fourteen. I wanted something that was age appropriate for all, required no prep, and could be done on a regular basis. The humble Squiggle – a simple idea I…
Last fall my boys and I made an early morning run to the dollar store to buy 21 balloons. We ended up standing behind the counter helping the lone, frazzled worker with our unusual order. One cut the string, one tied the string, two held our growing bunch of brightly colored balloons. When we got…
In 2017, we planned a trip to Rocky Mountain National. Park. In the weeks leading up to the trip I sought to instill in the kids a focused, mountains-are-amazing-and-we-can’t-wait-to-see-them mindset. I had no desire to spend an entire day driving cross-country only to have the kids too busy whining “Are we there yet?” to notice…
My Tree Journal There are five specific trees on our land–an oak, a rosebud, a crab apple, a silver maple, and a towering cottonwood–that have been singled out. Each of these trees has been chosen by one of the nature journalers in our family. Our plan is to carefully observe our selected tree month by…
Have you noticed the way that Christmas music blurs the line between the sacred and the secular? When December rolls around it is not at all uncommon to hear Bing Crosby crooning classics like “White Christmas” or “I’ll be Home for Christmas” on Christian radio stations, and over on secular stations all kinds of artists…
