Well before I learned that the state would not allow me to teach my own child to drive, I was teaching her to drive. To calm your nerves, for a few mornings she drove from home to seminary, which is held in the church in town. The roads are mostly deserted, and the speed is …

One of the first chores our children have learned is to put things “IN.” If we tell a child, “Jacob, can you put it IN?” where “it” is his toy car and “IN” is the garbage, I mean the toy car basket, he’ll jump to it. The kids love putting things IN. This is especially …

Long, long ago when I was considering trading in my old Camry for a four-wheel-drive something or other, I wondered if I should buy an old pickup truck. For various reasons, I opted not to; and though I’m glad we have the Jeep, we’ve had to make do occasionally. For example, when we built our …

I pulled the old toboggans out of the wood shed because I had to replace them with wood, and also because I thought it would be easier to use a toboggan than a wheelbarrow to pull firewood off the steep, overgrown hill behind our house. (I was right, but unfortunately I had already brought most …

Once when I was about 10 years old, I awoke very early on a Saturday morning in June. We had just moved into our new house in Rexburg, Idaho, where my father had recently been hired as a professor at Ricks College (now BYU—Idaho). No one else was awake. The sun was not even up, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …