Jess and I are super-hyper-overachievers, and with the first half-dozen of our children we thought we could handle it all while our children sat around reading The Lightning Thief (where does he keep the lightning once he’s stolen it, by the bye?) or Harry Potter for the 17th time.
But with seven children, we can’t do …

Well a few months back I mentioned my homemade laundry detergent and bragged about what a great job it did getting our clothes clean. There was only one problem: it was lumpy. This must be because I used half a bar of Fels Naphtha soap ( which I completely forgot to use this time). I …

As I write this I’m eating homemade butter on homemade wheat & buckwheat bread. (What is buckwheat? If you can tell me without Googling it or looking in Wikipedia, you win! I have no idea what buckwheat is. Jessica ground some to put in muffins the other day and there was still some buckwheat flour …

Jessica’s surprise birthday present for me was, by the way, dinner and tickets to a performance of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. Fabulous! The performance was inside an Episcopalian cathedral and the sound was heavenly. It was a wonderful evening, but it’s not my birthday yet. I’m not 40 for a few more days.
On the …

Doug sings Sm
My friend Drew has been trying to compress this video enough to post on the blog. He finally got it, thought I look a little compressed as well (it feels somewhat squashed). I hope you like it; feel free to pass it along, but include the disclaimer below.
What is going on in this …

Skiiiing. That’s fun to write. Skiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing. It actually sounds like little kids tearing straight down the hill, the way they do on skis. If they fall, they don’t have to worry about breaking anything. They just bounce.
On Saturday I took some of our heaps of extra money and invested it in Memories for the Kids …

Every Monday night for a half hour or so we have Family Home Evening, where the family gets together and one of us gives a gospel-centered lesson while the rest of us torture the cat, gaze at the ceiling, tell Sarah to GO SIT DOWN every twelve seconds, etc. Last night Mom helped Natalie (age …

I have a bad habit of splitting my kindling on the hearthstone, and occasionally the hatchet dives clear through the wood and bounces off the hard flat stone. This is not very friendly to the blade, so every now and then I have to sharpen the hatchet. (The last time I did so was probably …

A friend invited me to go snowshoeing with him yesterday, and to my legs’ consternation I agreed. Also brought Emma along, who is shown here looking south over Lake Pend Oreille from about 3.5 miles into the hike. We had to quit at about four miles because I was too tired to continue, and we …

Two years ago today, while we were struggling to finish the plumbing in the house (we ended up calling in the professionals, $2400) the snow was waist deep on the level. By mid-February, our driveway looked like a white hallway. I have pictures where the snow berms were above my head.
We had so much snow …