Now that my husband and three daughters are at a Christmas pageant, and I have the wonderful excuse of staying home with a sleeping baby boy, I can give you Part 2! (If you missed part 1, you can find it here.)

Backing up a bit, since my laughing mother kindly reminded me that I forgot this tidbit: The night before Thanksgiving, the girls and I made pumpkin bread to have for breakfast Thanksgiving morning. Baking with the girls is stressful. They are adamant about having an equal amount of tasks to do.

“You crack the egg, then I’ll put it in, and she can break it with the spoon.”

“We need one and half cups of flour, so how about we each do a half cup?”

“You hold the measuring cup while I pour and she stirs it in.”

I kid you not. And four people crowding around the counter (me to supervise) is a mess. It didn’t help that we were pushing up against bedtime, so I was trying to hurry.

With these girls, hurrying is not in their vocabulary. That preheat oven step needs to come, like, 7th next time, because the oven was ready to go looooong before the batter was in the bread pan.

To make matters worse, my thawed pre-packaged bag of mashed pumpkin wasn’t quite enough, so I had to borrow from the bag for the next day’s pie–an issue I’d sort out later, darn it, just get the bread in the oven already!

Finally, the oven door shut and the girls were scooted off to bed, with the torturous smell of baking pumpkin bread wafting down the hallway.

The next morning, as we enjoyed our delicious bread, I searched for the bags of pumpkin I needed for my pie. They were nowhere in the fridge. I checked the counter, the sink? Nada. Read the rest of this entry →