What with all this snow we’ve been having, my kids have decided to take advantage of the situation and go live in it.

They used the same materials and methods that Mr. Handsome and I employed when we built our adobe house in Nicaragua: a mold, a packable material (like mud or snow), and the block-building techniques they learned as toddlers, and that’s it. It’s much easier to build a house than people realize, but don’t tell anyone. I wouldn’t want to put Mr. Handsome out of work.

This house is rather sturdy, with thick walls studded with peep holes to let light in and provide a small scouting range. It’s insulated in there, too. I know because they never answer me when I call them from the Big House.

I really like the turrets. My kids have style and flair. I am so proud of them.

Miss Beccaboo looks like she’s stepped straight out of our Material World book, posing by her little home. She looks so hearty and durable and a bit squinty, like people who live in snowy climates always seem to end up looking. She’s a natural.

See, here’s a true-blue family from Uzbekistan.

Note the snow and the thick, heavy coats.

And here’s my daughter. That she’s from Virginia, you would never guess.

In order to make a roof, they stole some wood from the barn.

They stole a bunch of blankets and old rugs to cover up the door and to carpet the floor.

They sit out there and have a blast.

I think Miss Beccaboo might be slowly freezing.

Oops. There she goes. She passed out.

In Uzbekistan they huddle under green blankets, too. Maybe draping themselves with green helps them to dream warm, summery dreams.

Even I have gotten into the frigid spirit of things and have taken to harvesting snow as a major source of food for our daily diet.

It’s really quite practical. I just open the kitchen door,

swipe a bowl of white stuff from the great outdoors,

drizzle it with a mixture of cream, vanilla, and sugar,

stir it up,

and dish it out.

We call it Snow Cream. It does not fool anyone, but it’s still fun.

About one year ago: Lemon Tart

I took two years of art class in high school. My instructor was grumpy man with a dry sense of humor who drilled us on technique like there was no tomorrow. The first year of art class we learned perspective. There was one perspective…

And then there was another…

And then there was yet another…

And when he tired of teaching perspective, he started in on the shading.

There were still lifes, too, with multi-sided glass bottles. He was mean.

Because I didn’t take art until I was a junior, that meant that I was a senior when I took Art II. (Look at me! I can do math!) I was bummed about that (once I caught on to how the math added up) because I discovered I loved art class, and I wished I could’ve taken all four years. Alas, oil, sculpture, and water colors were not to be my lot in life. (Maybe this is why I am forever mixing oil and water and turning the end result into sweet sculptures?)

But I wasn’t the only slow learner—there was another senior by the name of Brian who was in my same situation, and because we were high-and-mighty seniors with inflexible schedules, we ended up taking the class during Mr. Art Teacher’s free period. As a result, it was more of an independent study, but Mr. Art Teacher never let us forget that we were cutting in on his free period, and he made us suffer for it, too. To teach us the proportions of the human body, he had us sketch each other over and over and over again. I drew Brian bending over, Brian reaching up, Brian doing leg lifts, Brian doing back bends, Brian sitting with his legs crossed, Brian doing a split, Brian swimming, Brian running, Brian spazzing out.

We also learned the proportions of the head, and then we utilized different techniques—pencil point, stippling, cross-hatching—to draw faces.

Pencil point was fun, but very tedious. Do you recognize these eyes?

That’s right, it’s Atticus Finch.

Otherwise known as Gregory Peck.

When my brother was in art class, a few years after me, he drew a picture of the two of us and then gave it to me for a Christmas present.

I was—and am—thrilled. I never give away my art because I do so little of it and because it takes so incredibly long to complete a picture. It now hangs above my sofa, right under a picture of another little boy.

Can you guess who this little boy is?

Yep, it’s Mr. Handsome, back before he had earned the Mister prefix. It appears he always had the handsome part down.

I drew the picture while we were dating. The Grand Matriarch gave me the original to work from and kept my secret for the many months that I worked on it. It was to be a Christmas present, but I didn’t get it done in time, so it turned into a Valentine Day’s gift. But by that time, I had decided that I wanted to break up with him (not because of the drawing). So I hitched a ride with a friend up to his home place in New York over Valentine’s Day weekend, gave him the picture, and then told him our relationship was over. I cried all the way back to Virginia.

Oh, you want to know why I was breaking up with him? Well see, I didn’t think he listened to me very well. He never asked me questions; he didn’t pry into my personal life like all my girlfriends did. He was rather aloof and cool, and I didn’t feel nurtured enough.

But he called me the next day and reported he had already read a good chunk of two different books (recommended by his older sister, bless her heart) about communication and how men and women relate. He asked me questions. He was attentive. I agreed, relieved to the tips of my grief-stricken toes, to give the relationship another shot. Six months later we tied the knot. (And then we fought for an entire year, but that’s too tedious to delve into right now. I’m supposed to be talking about art.)

I started a few other pencil point drawings after that, or maybe it was before—I don’t remember.

You can see the gridding process a little more clearly in the unfinished pictures.

We learned about pastels in the last quarter of my senior year in high school, and then we used pastels to draw a face. (Mr. Art Teacher really knew how to drive home a point.) I chose to draw a picture of an old woman that I found in an old National Geographic magazine. After working on her for nine weeks, I grew rather fond of her and started referring to her as My Granny.

My parents had the picture matted for Christmas, and my father built the frame. It’s one of my most prized possessions.

I’m particularly fond of her fly-away hair and her crinkly laughing eyes. She’s watched over our home for so long that she’s practically a member of the family. In fact, when no one else is around, she talks to me. Sometimes I hold her stick so that she can flex her fingers, but though she pleads most pathetically, I refuse to give her a turn with the hairbrush.

I never draw anymore. I’m not actually an artist. I’m not compelled to pick up paper and pencil and record my world through pictures, and the pictures I did draw didn’t come welling up out of me—all my art was copycat work. Which I don’t think discredits it as art; it’s just not inspired art.

In any case, inspired or not, I plan to teach my kids the techniques that I learned in high school. I saved all my notes from class, so I’m equipped and ready. And, if and when my kids go to high school, I will insist—no ifs, ands, or buts—that they take art every single year.

And I hope their art teacher is good and mean, too.

About one year ago: A bedroom birth. My baby is FOUR years old. I am such an old woman.

I’m a little under the weather. I can tell because I didn’t want coffee this morning and the only times I don’t want coffee are when I’m sick or pregnant … and I’m not pregnant. I’m not even really that sick—I just have an itchy throat, an itty-bitty headache, and extra sensitive eardrums. (Why, oh why, have all my children been gifted with such hearty sets of lungs? We’re a family of noisy windbags—there’s no two ways about it.)

I’m the first to acknowledge that I’m a pansy when it comes to illness. No, that’s not true—Mr. Handsome is the first to point it out. But I have to agree with him; I simply can not cope with even a touch of illness. I don’t understand how some people are able to function when they have fevers. Mr. Handsome is one of those people. He may shiver and shake all night long, but come morning, up he pops, ready to go to work. It’s a mystery.

(Lest anyone think that I’m a complete wimp, let me remind you that I pushed a seven-pounder and two nine-plus-pounders out of my nether regions [the other seven-pounder was evacuated via the sunroof], and I did not have medication and I did not cry. I yelled and swore and whimpered, but I did not cry.)

Despite passing up my coffee this morning, I was not sick enough to stay home from church. We drove the snowy eleven miles into town and, like we do every Sunday, we marched up front, staked out our chairs, and then Mr. Handsome and I proceeded to juggle toys, kids, attitudes, and hymnals (though I didn’t actually sing, myself) in full view of the brethren and sistern. And now this afternoon, after an Ibuprofen and a nourishing bowl of beans and rice, I feel well enough to drink coffee.

And eat a couple brownies.

I know, I know. Sugar weakens the immune system so it’s stupid to eat sweet stuff when you feel blah, but I do it anyway. It’s foolish maybe, but it’s also delicious.

These brownies are astonishingly good—rich, chewy-moist, and so dark they are almost black. This is astonishing because of this one little fact: they are made with cocoa powder, nearly a whole cup of it, instead of the standard bar chocolate. I’ve always thought that cocoa is somehow rather inferior to the bar version, that goodies baked with cocoa will be dry and crumbly-powdery like the cocoa itself, but—oh hark!—I think that no longer. My anti-cocoa-in-brownie world has been rocked, and it’s been a most glorious experience.

These are brownies to call home about, so I did. My mother couldn’t even wait twenty-four hours for me to post the recipe, so I recited it to her over the phone while she wrote it all down. She didn’t quite believe that I could remember the exact recipe without looking and kept asking me to repeat things and saying Now are you SURE you got that right? and How can you REMEMBER this without looking? and Just go look up the recipe and THEN tell me, but I held my ground (in the bathroom where I was hiding from the rest of the family). I gave it to her straight. And now I’ll give it to you, too.

Rock-My-World Cocoa Brownies
From Deb at Smitten Kitchen

I’m wondering if I could make the recipe with an even cup of cocoa. I may try that next time, but if you beat me to it, report back here, okay?

10 tablespoons butter
1 1/4 cups sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup minus 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
½ teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs
½ cup flour

Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium-high heat. Turn the heat back to low and add the sugar, salt, and cocoa and stir to combine, cook for a minute, stirring steadily, and then remove the pan from the burner. Cool slightly and then stir in the vanilla. Using a wooden spoon, beat in the eggs, one at a time. Add the flour and stir to incorporate. Beat it a little longer with the wooden spoon, forty strokes or so (it’s a stiff batter so this is no easy task), and then pour the batter into a greased 8 x 8 inch pan.

Bake the brownies at 325 degrees for 25-35 minutes—the top should be set, but a toothpick inserted in the middle will come out a little wet. Cool, cut, and eat. (The cooling part is optional.)

About one year ago: nothing, so I’ll leave you with some other brownie recipes. Brownies (my standby), Coconut Brownies (fancy-shmancy), and Chocolate Truffle Cake (kind of a brownie, kind of a cake).