It was not long after Rosemary Clooney died. We heard her song, “Mambo Italiano,” on the car radio.

My 9-year-old daughter reflected. "This reminds me making pizza."

“Mambo Italiano” was on the soundtrack to “Big Night,” the 1996 Stanley Tucci movie about two Italian brothers operating a restaurant on the New Jersey shore in the 1950s.

I loved the movie, bought the music, and played it whenever we made homemade pizza, which was all the time.

Was.

It had been I-don't-know-how-long since we actually plunged our fingers into gooey, homemade dough.

Back when she was four, we'd make homemade bread and pizza six, seven times a month. When the second child came along, we scaled back, but just a little.

And as much a part of the ingredients --- the basil and fresh garlic, the splash of red wine in the sauce, the fistful of wheat germ in the dough --- was our music.

So I’d pop in the "Big Night" tape and listen to Rosemary Clooney, Louis Prima and Italian songs by Claudio Villa and Matteo Salvatore. The movie revolves around one fabulous Italian course after another. (Rent the flick, and be sure you're not only hungry when it's over, but that you're headed out for Italian.)

We‘ve been asked, "Why don't use a bread machine to make the dough?"

"We do!" I taught my daughters to answer. Then we’d hold up our hands and wiggle our fingers.

Making it yourself takes longer than ordering it, sure, but making it our way took even longer. Because before it became our pizza dough, it was our "play"-dough, and the girls used it make shapes, to squeeze and twist strips of dough into challah braids, or "flourdough" men, giant pretzels, whatever. All the while I'd grate the cheese and stir the homemade sauce.

The joy of making pizza in that manner gave way to stupid logic. I added up the time it took to make it, folded in the cost of all the ingredients, and figured in the clean-up time. Turns out that by comparison ordering take-out pizza was a bargain.

And to tell you the truth, in the past three years, I have not missed all that scraping dried tomato sauce off the stove and sweeping dough chunks from behind the refrigerator.

The kids usually grew restless toward the end of the pizza making and drifted off toward their doll house.

And when I handed them brooms to sweep up the flour, they‘d be stricken with tummyaches.

I can't even say our homemade pizza tasted better. Often as not, the tried-and-true local pizzeria recipes trounced our higgledy-piggledy, never-the-same-way twice stab at Morelli pie.

Yet with every pizza box I contorted into the garbage can, I missed those moments. The flour on their noses. The massive rolling pin in their little fingers. The impatient peeking through the oven window. Their excitement being permitted to pour the wine into the sauce. The way we held our first slices aloft as if offering to the heavens. As Rosemary Clooney sang, I wondered what my daughter missed.

Doris Leckey writes about 16th-century Carmelite nun St. Teresa of Avila in the Catholic Reporter: “She spoke of interior life, that inner landscape where the true self dwells. But she also emphasized the importance of faithfulness to the small, everyday domestic tasks.”

Is there prayer in making pizza? Brother Rick Curry, author of "The Secrets of Jesuit Breadmaking," says yes: "Each time I bake bread, I'm reminded of the simplicity of mixing unrelated ingredients that are then transformed into the most wonderful delight."

The family is also joined together by the flour and water, to laugh and talk, to be together to have memories so that being together in the future will have that much more of a foundation.

Joy Ducket Cain writes in Essence magazine: "In that quest to have more, be more, do more, we often wind up losing ourselves.” As my daughters grow, take swimming and gymnastics classes, play on soccer teams, as their homework schedules grows more demanding, as their number of friends expands, things have to give.

I'm just wondering what part of ourselves we lost when we started ordering our pizza in. Yes, there's nothing stopping us from making our own pizza, but this time around we'll probably have to pencil it in on the calendar.