There’s a Junie B. Jones book that begins with Picture Day at Junie B.’s school. She’s horrified that the photographer snaps her picture just as she’s squeezing one eye shut and making a horrible face. The picture is so bad, that poor Junie B. hides it under her bed to scare the monsters away.

As the fall bake-a-thon continues in the Sweet Pea Kitchen, I’ve been trying to keep things light. Not that I am opposed to a good decadent dessert, it is just if I didn’t have some good light and healthy baked goods up my sleeve, we’d all be needing some new, bigger clothes.

So it was a fun challenge last week to create something tasty, yet light, when we had some unexpected visit from my brother last week. He flew in from California and so a lot of the Ohio family dropped in on a week night for some dessert and conversation.

In the pantry I had some:

On Saturday we returned home from an afternoon out and about and found a huge bag of corn waiting by our front door. Although there was no name attached, we knew the corn had come from our neighbors diagonal to us. We've also, in the past, been the lucky recipients of vine-ripened tomatoes, knobbly homegrown cucumbers, and the odd green pepper or two.

A very good friend of mine flew in from Rochester, New York yesterday to spend a long weekend with us. I haven't seen her since 2001, when Scott and I packed up 12-month old L., the cat, houseplants, suitcases, and a high chair into our old Dodge minivan and drove south, leaving behind those graduate school days, and too many friendships. The other day I looked through an old photo album, trying to find some pictures of this friend to show the kids. I was looking for one in particular: in it my friend J. is sitting on our old couch, holding a tiny, brand-new L. in her arms.

Sunday was a grumpy day for all of us. It poured icy rain all day long. The kids alternately moped around, pestered us (play with me! play with me!-Or-I'm bored! I'm bored!), or fought and bickered about every minute thing possible (She breathed on me! He touched my arm!). We had family visiting for the weekend, and when they sped off on Sunday morning, in a whirlwind, we were left to pick up the pieces of two kids grappling with a healthy case of post-visit, post-spoiling, cabin-fever-induced, flat-out grouchiness.