My mom, who many would consider a Saint, has five children: three girls and two boys. My dad has them too, but my mom stayed home with us until I was about 13...Sainthood awaits the woman, I am certain. Even we span the broad age range of twenty-six (my little sister) to 41 (my oldest brother).

During my elementary school years, life was pretty good for her I think; my two brothers and my older sister and I would head off to classes day in and day out, only three of us - one brother was in high school - coming home only for lunch (when we weren't at choir or band or gymnastics or calligraphy or karate or skating or swimming classes) and my mom would see us for that hour and then happily wave good-bye when we left to go back to school, a toddler clinging to her skirts. Our elementary school was within walking distance of home so she didn't have to worry about driving us there or transporting us home. She could spend her afternoons watching soaps and eating chocolates (yeah, right).

The summers however, were a totally different story. My mother at one point had a two year old girl, an eight year old girl (me!), an eleven year old boy, a twelve year old girl and a sixteen year old boy. I'm not sure sometimes why she didn't just start a rock band with us. The summers were tough though because she had to keep all of us occupied - well, my oldest brother kept himself fairly well occupied, as I recall - without spending everything her hard-working husband was earning and without pawning us all off on her own mother (which she sometimes would manage to do for up to about two weeks at a time).

I remember gymnastics classes and swimming lessons (which I resolutely refused to attend...I don't know how I learned to swim), day camp (why not over-night camp I have always wondered) and trips to the cottage. There were family picnics and trips to the Toronto Islands and my sister even once took myself and three of my same-aged cousins on a "Tour of Old Toronto" which kept us out of my mom's hair and gave us knowledge of buildings such as The Gooderham Worts/Flat Iron Building and the First Toronto Post Office and The Consumer's Gas Building where apparently the builders found bones buried in the basement in the 1970’s. All of these sorts of activities filled my summers, but there was one that I recall vividly and will remember for the rest of my life: Colborne Lodge.

My older sister and I spent two weeks heading out to the High Park area on the subway every morning, to be greeted by two ladies dressed in clothes from the early 1900's. We spent whole days with these women, learning everything there was to know about keeping a house over one hundred years ago. We learned all about horsehair furniture, spinning wheels and how to mix dough without a mix-master. We learned how to fluff a feather bed, how to hang out laundry and how to sit and do needlepoint over tea in the drawing room in the afternoons.

Some people, I'm sure are wondering what we had done wrong to deserve such punishment! Nothing - my sister and I were thrilled! The most vibrant memory of those two weeks would affect me for the rest of my life: I recall being in this gorgeous mammoth kitchen with huge wood tables and hanging pots and pans and a gigantic open fire place at one end, and being handed a recipe for Oatmeal Cookies. We then made a batch, by hand and baked them in the fireplace/oven. The ladies informed us afterwards that we were the first kids they'd had who didn't just pour all of the ingredients into a bowl without reading the recipe...and thus that day, a true Domestic Goddess was born.

These oatmeal raisin chocolate chip cookies were also born that day and the recipe lives on, written in my sister’s beautiful calligraphy, in one of my mom's recipe collections. I added the raisins and chocolate and changed the lard in the original recipe to butter, but other than that this recipe is as good as it was the day I first made it...seemingly more than a lifetime ago.