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Our garden is producing well for us these days. I have piles of squash and green beans to do something with – soon. Tonight, Blaine came in with a pepper. He handed Ruby a bite. She begged for more. I told him he should have given her a spicy pepper. He had.

We aren’t spicy people. I’ve never bought cayenne in my life. One year we made green tomato salsa and Blaine insisted we should use at least some of the jalapeño the recipe called for. Last year, we made more salsa. We left the jalapeño out.

This year, we bought peppers. Green ones, red ones, yellow ones, orange ones. When we got home, we had two hot ones. Perfect. “Mildly hot” they were labeled. Yeah, we’ll see. I know someone who loves hot anything, so the peppers, if need be, become a donation.

Turns out, two more pepper plants were mislabeled completely. Those are anything but mild. So now we have four hot pepper plants. Perfect.

Tonight, he’d brought in one of the mild ones. Ruby’s first bite went well, so he sliced it up and all the kids except for Charlotte grabbed a piece.

Um… yeah. Mild, not so much. I had five kids crying and whining and drinking milk and crying some more. Poor Pierce was licking my dress and trying to wipe off his tongue. Even Blaine was making horrible faces. Thank goodness, he refrained from whining.

Either my kids are really, really wimpy – which, when it comes to spicy is probably true – or those pepper labels lie. Judging from the red clown mouth Pierce still has an hour later, I’m going to say it’s the latter.

I didn’t try it.