Potato, Party of Six

 This is my favorite sitting place. The gravel pit is starting to rip up the path to get here and it makes me sad but so far, I can still get here if I take my hikers and go off-road. 

That’s right. My six year old. Because why shouldn’t ALL my kids be better at math than I am?  This is my punishment for reading a book under the desk for all of grade school and most of junior high. Pretty sure. 

 I grew up on 100% whole wheat bread and continue to make it weekly for my (non-gluten-free) family. The GF kid gets GF bread that tastes like sadness.  Some people are scared of making bread. I get it. The recipes can seem daunting. But I'm here to beginner-proof your bread errors.  There are really only three places you can mess up.  1. Water to flour ratio.  2.  Forgetting the salt.  3. Under-proofing.  Here's a video and more instructions below if you want words. You old person, you. Also, you can absolutely do this in a bowl and hand mix. All of the same rules apply except for a 5 minute machine kneed, do ten minutes. Call it your arm workout. Let rest 1 hour and kneed again for 5 before shaping.  Recipe  1/4 c yeast 1/4 c oil 1/4 c honey 1.5 c warm water (110F-ish. Don't kill the yeast!) Let that sit in your bowl for a bit until the yeastie beastie's are bubbling.  Then add enough whole wheat flour (or white or a mix of the two, I'm not here to judge) that whe

 And why is it Mother’s Day?  Curly Fry: tomorrow is Mother’s Day!  Tater Tot: Ah man!  Curly Fry: It’s the day we get to say thank you to our mom!  Tater Tot: Thankful for WHAT?!?!  ANd I’ve got to say, based on these yayhoos behavior All. Day. Long. He meant it. None of these potatoes even mentioned it's Mother's Day.    I’m super over this non-holiday. 

Wait. WUT?! Snax? This is dream?  Spicy snax. With clawz. Me no want it.  Why did spicy snax take my spot?  Spicy snax wins. Bed not worth the clawz.   

 Growing up is hard. Raising kids is hard. Being an adult is hard. One of the natural responses to things that are hard is fear. And fear tends to lead to lashing out. Last week, some kids were throwing rocks in the park next to our house and one of those rocks broke a window. The kids were so scared, they took off. We were scared because we didn’t know at the time if it was intentional or just an accident. It took me a couple hours to track down the kids and involved using video from a neighbor and intel from some middle schoolers I know. I took the time to do that because I didn’t want to be scared. But what I did not know at the time, was that I was also doing it to grow.  I thought I would be angry when I found the rock throwers but as soon as I saw them and took a minute to think and watch them play, all I could feel was peace.  I decided in that minute to treat them as though I understood their infinite potential. At that point I knew one of their names so I called it and he turn