My youngest son is a picky eater. I’ve tried all the tricks. I’ve insisted that he at least tries whatever is served. I’ve tried to force him to eat; I’ve tried bribes. I’ve tried building our menus around his preferences. Mostly, I guess, I have resigned myself to it.

You will never believe where this delicious meal came from.

Then one day I got the Jamie Oliver cooking app on my iPhone. It has many how-to videos and we enjoyed watching them immensely. (They’re great for long car drives, by the way). It also has recipes, and young son chimed in that he would like to make the pork chow mein. Just as I was about to tell him “this recipe is way to complicated,” I stopped myself…

We made the shopping list, bought all the ingredients and then we went through the elaborate preparation (“20-minute meals” my foot!) Sure, we got some parts wrong, but we ended up with something that looked pretty good (see photo). And guess who ate every last scrap on his plate!

We’re getting ever closer to the ideal. When I was child, we had family friends who had all their camping gear assembled and organized on shelves right next to their car port. All they had to do was select the gear and they could be packed and on the road inside of 30 minutes. Now that’s what I call the ideal!

It took me a good part of two days to go through the gear and make sure everything we needed was there. I’m sure we’ll be missing something, but if I did my job right, it will be something minor.

The truth is, forgetting something tends to make the whole event more of an adventure anyway.

The other thing I enjoy when I go out with the kids is when we talk about something we’re looking at or doing. That’s one of my favourite things about the Village: there are so many things to look at and wonder about and talk about with my kids. I remember a long talk about nails, because we had read the part in Little House on the Prairie (yes, the BOOK, not the cheesy TV show) where Laura was picking up the nails that fell on the ground when pa was putting on the roof. We were wondering how they were made, what they cost, how strong they were compared to our nails, how hard it must have been to nail them in straight and so on. It was a long conversation and it all started with one little nail.