I’m not sure why I tackled the homemade marshmallow last weekend. I was up for a challenge, and those little puffy pillows of sweetness – how hard to make can they be, really? – seemed like a worthy contender.

My mother-in-law was over that morning. She spent the night with us after the Florida-Arkansas football game, a night game that didn’t end until past my bedtime. I had skipped out on the game, preferring instead to lounge around at home with the kiddos, the Gator game on ESPN, and take-out Pad Thai.

While my mother-in-law sipped her first cup of coffee that Sunday morning, the kids helped me gather ingredients for the marshmallows. Oliver measured the sugar by the half-cup full, checking with me after each scoop. Madeline added the gelatin to water in the stand mixer. When she crinkled her nose at the funky, animal odor that arose from the bowl, I thought I’d lost her. The enticement of the eventual marshmallow was strong, however, and she rebounded.

While I stood over the stovetop, waiting for the boiling sugar syrup to reach 240 degrees, my mother-in-law joined me in the kitchen. Like an exotic gorilla behind glass at the zoo, I had piqued her curiosity.

In a moment of brilliant motherhood earlier this week, I threatened to cancel my son’s seventh birthday.

I said this to him as I walked him and his sister into school on Tuesday morning. He likes me to walk him in, and I know this well. But that morning, I couldn’t find parking spot on my first drive through the school’s parking lot. Or on the second. By the third pass, as I slowed every 90 seconds to allow moms and dads and their backpack-laden children to cross the parking lot, I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears. I was growing ever more frustrated and annoyed. My limit had been reached.

“We’re doing drop off today, guys,” I said, with finality.

I had suggested doing drop off on parking lot lap number one. On lap two, I threatened it. On lap three, my hands gripped the steering wheel tightly, and I unclenched my jaws briefly enough to declare that we were doing drop off, and THAT was THAT.

Once during last school year, when Oliver was in kindergarten, I dropped the kids off at the drop off line, rather than walking them in. It was raining hard that day, and I didn’t want to get wet. He refused to get out of the car and immediately burst into tears. After I forced him out of my car, he was so distraught that he just stood there on the sidewalk, sobbing, seemingly paralyzed with anguish. A couple of teachers rushed over to him and held his shoulders gently. I drove off, wanting to move on so the parents in the minivans behind me could drop their own (happier) children off. I felt like a complete jerk. But I hadn’t gotten wet. There was that.

Our annual week at the beach is already becoming a distant memory, even though it was only four weeks ago. I meant to write about it much sooner than now, but within 24 hours of returning home from the beach, life became hectic and harried. But that is what life does, right? Life careens ahead, hurtling through the yellow caution lights, never pulling over to the curb to allow one to catch one’s breath, much less catch up.

If we can coordinate it amongst our schedules, our weekly summer beach trip is usually a joint vacation with good friends. This year, we rented a huge beach cottage one block from the Gulf of Mexico – more of a beach compound, really, with one main house and two guest cottages – and filled it with three adult couples, six children, one babysitter, and enough LEGOs to construct the island of Manhattan, to scale.

The adults made up an interesting group of medical specialists – two oncologists, one hematologist (who is also an oncologist, even though she denies it), one family practitioner, one endodontist, and one neurosurgeon. Despite this, conversations, thankfully, did not fixate on cancer, brain tumors, root canals, or recent influenza strains. Work chatter was kept to a minimum, and we all preferred it this way.

What we did talk about, and quite a lot, really, was food. And about drinks.