Live life ✔, Write ✔

This is the first post under my brand-new “Writing and Literature” label, where you can be sure to find very amateur book reviews and plenty of unsolicited advice about your reading choices.   Basically, I read a book and then, if I like it, I’ll recommend that everyone else read it, too.  It’s not a perfect system - I don’t have a ton of time to read and I’m quite certain you all have your own preferences that don’t match mine - but I have yet to find a better one, sooOOOOOooooo…  For today’s label-debut I offer a shameless plug for my very own book.   After years and years (and years and years) of hobby writing, I decided to stick one little toe in the publishing pool and self-publish a short chapter book for kids.  It’s geared toward elementary and middle school readers, and loosely based on the people and events in my own life (though all names are changed for the sake of privacy, and there has been a fair amount of artistic liberty and dramatizat...

Maybe it was just me, but I’m guessing somebody out there is going to be able to relate to this:  Do you remember being a child and looking at your parents, and seeing all that they had built, and were the caretakers of, and had authority over, and thinking “I’m going to be THERE someday”?  Not there physically, or financially…  Just THERE.  At the top end of the family food chain; the proverbial umbrella under which the kids and pets and responsibilities all stood.   I was probably eight or nine when I experienced that ‘here-and-there’ moment for the first time.  I realized, quite clearly, that I was in a stage of life that was in the “here”; on the early part of a growth-slope, ever climbing.  And that, someday (hopefully), I would be “there”; at the top of a mountain of life that I (with God’s help and a loving husband) had risen up from non-existence to something purposeful.  It occurred to me that, upon arrival at the top, I would have ...

I was looking back through some OLD writings today and stumbled upon this one, from circa 2009.  I still remember that night very well.  I thought it worth sharing.  I have revised it for the sake of my kids’ privacy - which they enjoy in increasing amounts as they get older.  For personal stories involving them I will be using the names of the four girls in my “Stanton Sisters” series of children’s stories - of whom were inspired by them in the first place. ____________________________________________________________________________ Kids and Grocery Carts offer the greatest rewards… It’s Monday evening at 9:00 p.m. and I am just leaving the house to get groceries after getting Ellie to bed and then starting Tess’ bath, only to have to turn her over to her dad because she was putting up a sizable fight, and I had been doing battle with her since around 7:20 a.m.  I yell (over her screaming) that I’ll be back soon, and duck out.  I drive mindlessly to the s...

Some teacher somewhere just rocked my whole world today, and has absolutely no idea.  My daughter came home with a page of math homework that she needed help with.  You’re probably already thinking that you know where this is going, but it’s not a curriculum issue with “Common Core”.  It’s not the dreaded long division, or the “new math” methods make us morph into Mr. Incredible - “Math is MATH!”  Nope.  So there I am washing up a few dishes when she walks in with a paper in her hand.  She sits down at the kitchen table with a page of the “Greater Than, Less Than and Equal To” problems to solve.  You know the kind; there are two numbers - or something to that effect - with a little blank circle in the middle.  Hers looked kinda like:  4(6-3)           (3+2)5 (only I can't get the circle in the right place so I guess you'll just have to imagine it...) She had to analyze the two sides, and then place the correct sig...