By: Keturah Thomson

Dad walked into the room the other day with a box in his hands, displaying the label, Wagon Wheels. “What is this?”

Mom was laying on the couch, but she brightened up instantly. “Okay, I saw those at the market! I didn’t even remember them until my friend pointed them out and said, ‘I haven’t seen those in ages!'”

(Wagon Wheels, for those of you, like me, who are too young to know what they are, are individually packaged chocolate cake/cookie things.)

She explained that when she and Dad were growing up, all of the kids in school had Twinkies and Wagon Wheels in their lunches, but they did not. She was always jealous of the other kids’ lunches, feeling that her own Mennonite lunch with homemade butter tarts was a bit sub-par. (Dad laughed, he is quite a passionate supporter of butter tarts.)

Now, with twelve children, most of whom have graduated high school, she could not resist the temptation to buy her own box of Wagon Wheels at the market.

So we had a late-night Wagon Wheel party. It was such fun.

All of us homeschoolers got to experience school for a brief moment as we ate our Wagon Wheels with gratefulness, and then returned to our homeschooledness the next moment as we watched Amazing Grace, (a true story about William Wilberforce and the abolition of the slave trade, I highly recommend) while eating cake scraps leftover from a cake one of the entrepreneurs in our family had made and sold.

Who knows what we’ll be doing next week? Maybe you’ll find us eating Twinkies and discussing global warming, or eating butter tarts and talking about…probably the butter tarts.