might not have a new stepsister now!)
I was starting to feel kind of sorry for myself, but I snapped out of it when Charlotte's dog, Carrot, ran into the room. Carrot is a little schnauzer, and he loves to be in the middle of things.
"Carrot, no!" said Charlotte, as he started to nose through the box on her lap. "Out of kitchen!"
I laughed. It always sounds so funny to hear the Johanssens tell their dog to get "out of kitchen" — especially when you're in the living room, or the garage, or even outside. It's an all-purpose command that just means "get out of here." Dr. Johanssen, Charlotte's mom, started to say it when she wanted the dog out of the kitchen while she made dinner. But now they all say it, anytime and anywhere, because it's the only command that Carrot ever really pays attention to. (Well, he does know how to "say his prayers," by putting his paws in your lap and laying his head on them.)
Carrot scampered off — heading toward the kitchen, which made me giggle — and Charlotte and I went back to looking through her box. She pulled out a scrapbook full of yellowed newspaper clippings and leafed through it for a minute. "This would be great for the fifth-graders," she said. "They're doing this project of making a pretend 'one-hundred-
year-old newspaper.' It's going to have all the news from Stoneybrook, but from a hundred years ago. They're going to print it up and everything!" She put the book aside and picked up a bundle of letters. "I'll have to spend some time reading these," she said. "They're from my great-grandmother to her mother, who still lived in Denmark. And look! The return address is Stoneybrook. They were already living here by then."