Sunshine? Let's have a lemonade party

Care to join us?

After weeks of asking to make lemonade, my nine-year-old daughter got her wish. I remembered to get lemons at the store, the sun was shining, and we had a lemonade party on the front deck. She set a beautiful table (and cleaned up, too!) and treated us to Little House on the Prairie lemonade. The world of Laura Ingalls has been filling my daughter's mind. She just finished the series of books, and loved making a recipe from this cookbook:

My Little House Cookbook
Lemonade (4 Servings)

1/2 cup sugar
1 cup hot tap water
2 lemons
2 cups cold water
10 ice cubes
4 lemon slices

1. Pour the sugar into the pitcher. Ask a grown-up to help you add the hot tap water to the sugar. Stir about 20 times to dissolve the sugar. Ask a grown-up to help you cut the lemons in half and, using the lemon reamer or juicer, extract 1/2 cup of lemon juice. Add the lemon juice, the cold water, and the ice cubes to the mixture. Stir to combine.

2. To garnish, drop a lemon slice into each glass, or make a slit to the center of each slice and stand it up on the rim of each glass.

My nine-year-old is a night owl. We have decided, for several reasons, to work on getting her to bed earlier. Two Saturday mornings ago, I got the job of getting her up on the earlier schedule. I decided to go with the "spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down" method, and had some fun with our traditional Saturday pancakes. When I told my sleepy-head that I had a pancake for her in the shape of a bear (with a heart on its tummy) she opened her sleepy eyes and said contentedly, "Oh, Mama. That's something that MA would do." I had arrived! It was a great Mama moment.


Rabbit came, too