Five Minute Friday: INTO the Mouths of Babes

When my son Jordan was born, Herb looked at me and asked how Sarah Bernhardt and I ever had a child together. I thought maybe his mouth just looked big because the rest of him was so small. We took to calling him "Peanut" because he was tiny ... and refused to put on weight.

But the gi-normous mouth remained. It and the stuff he has put in it became the stuff of family legend.

Jordan — my "failure to thrive" baby — the one who would eat and not gain weight to the point where the doctor said instead of milk he thinks I produced cloudy water —is now an off-the-charts linebacker of a kid. He passed his older brother in height and weight about 2-3 years ago and hasn't stopped growing.

Let's look at his dietary history and see if we can figure out why...

Five Minute Friday: The Beautiful Ugly

This isn't our tree, but it's pretty darned close.

We have a cherry tree in our front yard. It's a very strange tree and is, frankly, kind of ugly. The people who lived here before us were avid gardeners, and they did some lovely things in our yard ... which we have promptly destroyed with four boys and two dogs ... or taken out to make room for baseball, swingsets, and a vegetable garden.

But this weird, ugly cherry tree remains. Apparently the previous owners tried to graft together two different types of trees. One is "upright" — meaning that the branches to up and out like most trees do — and one is "weeping" — meaning that the branches kind of droop. I don't know what was supposed to happen when you grafted together these two trees, but I'm pretty sure this ain't it.

We have half a tree that grows up, and half a tree that droops toward the ground.

The branches on one side are straight, and the branches on the other side are twisted.

Half the tree blooms white, and half the tree blooms pink. (That's a really weird sight to see.)

But then last year our little ugly cherry tree surprised us. It produced cherries.

Lest you say, "Well, duh. That's what cherry trees do," let me say that we have been in this house through 11 springs and summers, and it wasn't until last year that our weird schizophrenic tree produced cherries.

Why now? I don't know. But it show me in a very real, tangible way that something beautiful and sweet and unexpected can come out of a whole bunch of ugly.

[The term "The Beautiful Ugly" is from Ann Voskamp's book One Thousand Gifts.]