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...