Live life ✔, Write ✔

I am a creature of habit.  I like routine and thrive on structure.  You’re probably nodding your head, like “Yeah, most people are like that, it’s normal…”  Let me elaborate. I plan ahead.  Way too far, sometimes.  I get irrationally angry when I have to use whiteout on my wall calendar.  Everything on that calendar is written with an extra-fine-point black Sharpie and then encased in a color-coded box (yellow for sports, purple for medical appointments and reminders, green for school stuff, orange for travel…).  Those colors match the same events in my shared family Google calendars.  I have 13 different Google calendars, plus I import my husband’s.  They each have a color designation and a purpose of their own.  It wasn’t always like this (though I always wanted it to be).  The “little years” were too wrapped up in survival for me to be this organized.  As the girls got older, however, it became not only easier but entirely n...

Sometimes it’s slimy, green, and polka-dotty…  For the last week here in central Ohio, we’ve enjoyed a regular old-fashioned snowy winter.  It started with biting, bitter cold and wind, followed by a few days of falling white stuff, and now we’re blessed with a picturesque winter wonderland of a backyard, complete with white drifts, snow-covered limbs on all of the trees, and a solidly frozen creek (in most places).   Despite being twelve and fifteen-going-on-sixteen, two of my girls grabbed sleds and headed out back to play today, like they did when they were half this age. My youngest built a mini snowman and then managed to break up some of the ice in the creek.  She dragged her “trophy” - the biggest chunk - up to the deck to display it on the railing.   The quest for that ice trophy brought back a memory from five and a half years ago.  And that’s what I’m going to share with you today. It was early October of 2018, and the warm weather was s...

I would like to apologize in advance, again, but it’s still the end fringes of the holiday season and therefore the B usi EST time of the year, and I am keeping these newsletters short and sweet until I have survived fully enjoyed it. That said, New Year's always hits me hard in the feels.   Not the same feels as Christmas, birthday, and Easter feels, but it gets me all the same.  And, while it is the overarching implications of the marked passage of time that carry the most weight, the thing that stirs my emotions more than the date itself is the theme song that accompanies it, and the message it conveys. As we of the human race (or at least the Gregorian calendar following people) collectively reflect on the miracle that we survived another lap around the sun - some of us without loved ones who didn’t, some of us with new life we added over the year, but all of us changed in some way by the experiences the last 12 months brought - those famous notes ring out and I ge...

We’re only a few days away now, and that means that Christmas festivities are well underway in this house.   The decorations are up, the baking is in full swing, and even the (spoiled) dog’s gifts are wrapped and ready for the big day.   There are always SO many things that we try to fit into the holiday season, and that means that I am continually covered in flour, drained of creativity, and have very little (in reality NO) time to write this time of the year.  So this newsletter is going to be light on invention and words, but hopefully interesting enough based on its content; pickles and almonds. What do pickles and almonds have in common?  In this house, the answer is “Christmas Tradition.” By now you’ve probably picked up on the fact that we have a lot of family traditions.  A great many of them happen during the holidays, as one would expect.  I’m going to share two of those with you today.   The tradition of the hidden Christmas p...