Dan and I are not good at Netflix. We put a bunch of stuff in our queue and forget about it until we’re ready to watch a movie. Then we open up the red envelope and find that we’ve gotten some lame, stupid movie that neither of us admits to actually adding to our queue. When I’m stressed or anxious, we always end up with something scary or action-packed. When we’re feeling romantic, we end up with a kids’ movie. We cannot plan it right to save our lives.

In the last month we’ve sent back several movies without ever watching them. I even pulled one movie out of the envelope at the mailbox, took one look at it, put it back in the mailbox and lifted the little red flag. So, when Little House on the Prairie, Season One arrived a couple of weeks ago, I almost did the same thing. I loved the show as a kid, almost to the point of obsession, talking like Laura, dressing like Laura (my mom made me the complete outfit, bonnet and all), pretending in all ways that I WAS Laura Ingalls Wilder.

For the last two years we’ve adopted the tradition of sacrificing our sugary goods to earn the good graces and fabulous gifts of the Halloween Witch. She flies through the night sky two days after Halloween, collecting all treats that have not yet been consumed by the children of the land to add to her sticky, sugary, tooth-destroying stash. In return for these leftover treats, she leaves a toy for each child who gives up his or her candy completely.

Our dentist told us that it was much better for the kids’ teeth to eat a bunch of candy every day for a short period of time than to eat a little bit every day for weeks or months. The idea of fighting with them for weeks about when and how much candy they could eat was absolutely agonizing to me. So we told the kids to just eat whatever they wanted as fast as they could and let the sugar-high chaos ensue. In the end, we turned to the Halloween Witch for help when we realized that we absolutely could not handle what our children became each year as they barreled their way through a seemingly unending candy gorge-fest.

In our family we say we believe in praying to God, but I’m pretty sure that fairly frequently my kids pray at each other and even more often, they use their prayers as a chance to tell me off.

Magoo’s prayers are usually fairly repetitive. He says, “We thank thee for our family and friends and things and stuff,” and then closes his prayer. He figures this covers most everything important to him in his life without going into unnecessary detail and that if he keeps saying he’s thankful for what he has, there’s a good chance God will keep giving it to him. He rarely asks for anything. When he does, I’m pretty sure the request is directed at me, not The Man Upstairs. This week, for example, he prayed that he could please get to hold Wanda more tomorrow and shot me a meaningful glance.

Welcome to the world Little Wanda girl. You’ve been a part of this family for months now, nearly invisible to everyone around but very noticeable to me. I’ve carried you and nourished you and talked to you, mostly about “swimming down” and “going towards the light” and other useful instructions that would help free you from your watery cell inside of me.

I’m the one whose stomach you heard gurgling and whose 6 months of semi-violent morning sickness gave you the hiccups. I am the soft home whose walls you snuggled up against and occasionally tried to claw through, with the loud laugh and the voice that went on and on almost without ceasing. I am everything that’s surrounded you for the majority of your life. I am your world as you’ve come to know it.

And now the world’s changed.

I don’t know that my mom loved to cook as much as she dug the reactions she got from her standout meals. A daughter of the South, Bettye was renowned for her southern dishes, and her macaroni and cheese was the stuff of legend. People heard she was whipping up a pan, and they’d get into car accidents and break stuff and whatnot trying to get in line for a heaping serving before it was all gone. It wasn’t an easy dish to make back then; the grocery stores didn’t have those glorious pre-shredded bags of cheese, so she had to scrape countless blocks of sharp and mild cheddar over her beat-up hand-held shredder to get the right amount of cheese she needed for ginormous pans of mac and cheese, which should explain why she wasn’t a fan of the cooking part.

As a kid, I didn’t quite get my mom’s foot dragging in the kitchen; I’d beg her to let me help, and on the days when she’d hand over a block of cheese for me to shred, I’d handle it with great glee. I loved helping out in the kitchen! But as a mom charged with cooking three squares for a family of five most days of the week, I kinda get it now.