We were visiting George Washington’s Mount Vernon home last week. One of the exhibits focused on the food that would have been prepared and eaten on the estate in the late 1700’s. Martha Washington’s “Great Cake” would have been baked by one of the family’s enslaved cooks (I will write a post soon about Hercules) and then served to the delighted family and guests on very special occasions (such as part of a grand Christmas dinner). The cake was so well liked that granddaughter Patsy wrote the recipe down to share. I marveled at the amount of each ingredient in the recipe — eggs (40), sugar (4 pounds*), flour (5…
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The Key to Healthy & Happy Lives? The Answer Might Surprise You.
In his eye-opening book Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown and Company, 2008), Malcolm Gladwell tells a cross between a fairy tale and a detective story about a town whose inhabitants enjoyed good health. A curious and diligent doctor figured out that it had little to do with the food they ate, or the exercise they did, or the doctors they went to. It had everything to do with how they treated each other. It sounds like one of the storybooks we used to read to Natalie that would begin something like this: In a town called Roseto, Pennsylvania the people stayed healthy. They lived long, happy lives. What…
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When Things Don’t Work Out As Expected
Three years ago our family embarked on a two-year homeschooling adventure (planned) and I had the first of two lumpectomy surgeries for breast cancer (unplanned). Standing at a dramatic fork on life’s road, we threw away our old map and drew a new one that changed the way we saw the world. Little did we realize that “skipping middle school” would not only turn out to be the best thing for 12-year-old Natalie, but for all of us. Quite a few people have asked us, “How in the world did you manage to home school while going through cancer treatment?” To tell the truth, we can’t imagine what going…
