someone let these two kids get married.

You know, no matter how happy we look in that photo, we’re even happier today. I love you, Brooke!

can be really messy.

We’ve been exploring our culinary side. I tried to replicate Shoots’ honey-roasted walnut chicken and Brooke tested out the baguette pan we gave her for Mother’s Day. She did much better than I did: I used too much honey, so it was way too sweet.

Brooke has years of experience warming up baby food in the microwave. But even experts can fall prey to the deadly exploding sweet potatoes!

We have two discs from our respective queues. Brooke has The Ideal Husband, and I have My Favorite wife.

Quiet moments are rare in her life:

We find ourselves between being a one- and two-baguette family. If we buy one, no one is satisfied. If we buy two, we have leftovers. We err on the supply side of the equation. So, for the first time, we decided to try the French trick for salvaging stale bread the next morning: Pain Perdue or “French Toast.”

We dug up a recipe online and Brooke went to work. She sliced the tough bread, soaked the chunks in a batter, then cooked them in butter. She also concocted a powder-sugar/cinnamon drizzle.

The boys’ comments were, “This is great!” and “These are good, good, good!”

That sounds like chocolate, Jeremy thought, dark chocolate being broken off a bar. That’s not very considerate of Brooke to dig into her stash when I’m healing from oral surgery. A moment later, Brooke appeared in the living room holding one piece of Lindt in her mouth, and extending another piece in her hand.

Jeremy shook his head. “Oh, I really shouldn’t eat that.”

“Just suck on it,” she wasn’t offended that her offering was rejected, she was just shocked that anyone could reject a chuck of 70% dark chocolate.

“No, because chocolate spreads all over in my mouth and will get into my stitches.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Brooke paused contemplatively for the briefest of moments. It didn’t take her long to uncover the solution: “OK, I’ll eat it.”

Well, it’s been 2 years since Jeremy gave me the wonderful gift of a chocolate bar a week.  This last year has gone by quickly, and really is mostly a blur, but somewhere in the middle there was a special gift from France, and the year ended with another gift of chocolate. Yum!!

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