Oh Friday, you keep sneaking up on me.

FUNNY

This conversation was funny:

“Mom, can I google birds and bees?”

WHAT?  “Can you google what??”

“Birds and bees.  I am writing a story and I need to see some art images for both birds and bees.  This story has both animals.  Can I use Google to find pictures of birds and of bees?”

“Oh.  Yeah.  Sure.”

FASHIONABLE

Piper is by far the easiest of my children to shop for.  She likes most all clothing that you buy for her.

Isn’t this dress from GAP adorable?

FLAVORFUL

London and I celebrated her thirteenth birthday (and my birthday too) by going on a little overnight adventure with just the two of us.  Goodness – it was SO MUCH fun to spend time with her.

It was pretty much all London’s Choice for everything – from food to activity to whatnot.  The girl loves food.  She loves fun dishes and experimenting with meals and cooking and baking.  She loves her food to look pretty as well as taste good.  We had a lot of fun trying out cool restaurants in Asheville.  (A town that is pretty much perfect for food-loving folks.  And – beer loving people.  We don’t fall in that second category ourselves, but good grief.  I knew Asheville had become a craft beer town, but there was a brewery on every corner.  Every corner, you guys.  Surely all beers cannot taste that differently from one another.  But – hey, whatever.)

She was feeling in an Italian direction for dinner so we used the internets and my go-to opinion generator at TripAdvisor to see what people thought the best choice in Asheville was.  Our first choice was actually unavailable and you know what, I am so glad it was.

We hopped on over to Cucina 24 instead.  The atmosphere was nice and the restaurant was small and you could see the kitchen staff cooking at the wood fired oven in the open kitchen.  Our waitress was fabulous – funny and friendly.  The menu consisted of lots of meals that I could not pronounce.  We were about to ask the wait staff for some help when we remembered the old internets again.  (Who knew it could be so helpful?)  We tried their house made salumi board, the Tagliatelle Bolognese and for dessert we had pavlova and a variety of other fun goodies – a berry sorbet and meringue.

It. Was. All. Incredible.

And next week London has already put Tagliatelle Bolognese on our menu as she plans to attempt a version of it herself.  (The rewards of introducing your kids to good food early.)

FAITHFUL

C.S. Lewis has been convicting and encouraging me through his writings for most of my life.

I read this quote one morning recently and it’s rolling about inside my brain now.

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

— C.S. Lewis

FEELS

I love to read.  I forget sometimes to make it a priority, but I never am disappointed when I make time to read a novel here or there.

Why am I just now reading The Outsiders?

It’s good.  It’s simple.  It’s kind of profound.  And then a little elementary at times.  It’s highly quotable.  There’s this fabulous theme running through it that is true despite the passage of time and the shifting labels we choose to give groups of people.  This idea that, underneath our exterior, we are not so unalike.  That people are always more than what they appear to be – for better and for worse.  That rings true to me.

I liked it a lot and I don’t know how I ever made it from there to here without reading it.

And then.

Guess what I realized?

It was written by a girl.  (I assumed a guy wrote it.)  And I mean it – a girl!  As in, S.E. Hinton was a senior in HIGH SCHOOL when she had that novel published.  Can you believe that?

That’s some empowering stuff right there.  For my girls.  For me.

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