More butter.

It’s a pie practice day.

Around mid-August, I start making an apple pie every weekend. I call it practice pie. It’s to get back in the rhythm of doing it.

I work off my Grandma Betty’s old handwritten recipe. I know what it says. I don’t really need to see the recipe anymore, but I like remembering how she talked, because that’s how she wrote out her recipes. Not methodical and not formatted—but from her memory.

There are conversational little nods throughout. “Sometimes I like to add flour and a tsp of water.” “I like to sprinkle sugar on top.” Little tips, lots of dabs and dots. In her pie recipe, the bake time is tucked away in the fourth paragraph, so you have to read the whole thing through every time.

People used to read things through.

I made a butter crust today. It’s not how Grandma did it, but sometimes I like the taste and the look. My dad is in town, so I hadn’t planned to make a butter crust, but I forgot to pick up the shortening. So butter it is.

The thing about a butter crust is that it can turn out chewy. A chewy crust is the kiss of death in a pie competition. Texture is king!

And this happens because the dough feels too dry, so you want to add more water. But when you add extra water, the glutens are activated and science this, science that, it turns out chewy.

If you want a beautiful butter crust that isn’t chewy, you have to be sure not to overwork the dough and avoid adding more water.

Okay—but what do you do when the crust is too dry to work with?

Well, when you want to add water, what you really need is more butter.

A lot of things in life are like that. You have a problem and the instinctual way to fix it makes it worse.

Like today, when I was working on this pie.

It was on my list of to-dos along with church, wrangling the kids, getting ready for back-to-school week, filling out last-minute forms and, in transparency, a lot of to-dos around the book launch and interview series.

They all piled up, and it amounted to me feeling like I needed to get this pie done during nap and quiet time.

The kids are 5, 3 and 18 months. Only the little one naps. The big kids do “quiet time.” This usually happens after lunch while Milo naps. They are not actually quiet and they will pop downstairs about 15 times each, but they go to their rooms for an hour—or each other’s rooms. I’m not too strict about that as long as they don’t wake Milo.

So they took their third snack up for quiet time, and I attempted to knock out the pie.

It felt like the best way to get this pie made—to do it while the kids weren’t around.

Less distractions, less mess, less questions.

And then I remembered: less questions.

If I made the pie during quiet time, I could get it done. Cleanly, quickly, without little hands in everything. I could cross it off my list.

But I would have avoided the whole reason I make it in the first place.

The pie is for them. Not just for them to eat, but for us to make together.

Right now, the kids seem too young to take the pie seriously. But they are just old enough to be interested. And when they are old enough to take it seriously, they probably won’t be very interested in doing it with me.

This is the magic time.

So I stopped what I was doing and called the big kids down.

And things got messy and loud and there were fingers and sneezes in the pie ingredients, if I’m being honest.

But then I got to tell them about Grandma again.

And when Max told me I was holding the rolling pin wrong—“that’s not how everyone does it”—I got to explain to him that after you’ve learned how to do a thing really well, you can figure out which parts you like to do your own way.

They both did their part in helping. We used the scrap crusts to make their own little pie, too.

They did that one all by themselves.

We don’t practice this pie to make the perfect pie or win the contest. Sometimes I forget that, because we like competition around here.

Sometimes I want them to think their mom makes the best pie in the world, like I thought that about Grandma’s.

But you know what? They think that no matter what, because I’m their mom.

And what I really want is for them to practice this pie themselves someday when I’m gone.

The butter crust seems too dry, so you want to add water.

But what it needs is more butter.

The kids seem too crazy, so you want to use the time of calm.

But what you need is to lean into the crazy.