Life
Sunscreen, Shinguards, and Cleats, Oh My!
Aaron is playing on the junior varsity high school soccer team this year. I can’t remember how many years he’s been playing soccer. Maybe ten? I think his soccer days date back to when he was four and first entered the little recreation leagues we have out here. Since then, he’s moved onto more competitive…
Read MoreThe Battle
The battle began when someone told someone to tell Maggie about a class description that needed to be posted. The whole chain of command issue—why wasn’t the head “someone” coming right to her?—should have tipped Maggie off. But it didn’t. And after she’d crossed her t’s and dotted her i’s, made sure that the description…
Read MoreAll’s Well That Ends Well
Almost a week ago now, our local paper featured a feel-good story on one of the city’s public high school graduates. It’s been shared all over social media, and the school system has been proud to showcase it on Facebook and Twitter. The story begins like this: “Eighteen years ago, Cate O’Malley was a helpless…
Read MoreWhat I Realized
While I’m grateful that 2019 is behind us, I’m also grateful for the realizations I gained over the prior year. I’m listing them in no particular order. Acquaintance circles might stretch for miles, but the number of true friends a person has is very few. Using people is something that much of humanity…
Read MoreFinding My Voice
When I first began writing, my goal was mainly to share anecdotes about my day with the kids, or to keep record of something smart and pithy that one of them said. The act of writing served to lift me up, but it also made some of what I was doing more concrete. As time…
Read MoreEven More Words for the New Year 4
Each new year, I try to focus on a set of words to guide me through the next fifty-two weeks. Last year, I identified these words. What is not started today is never finished tomorrow. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Sadly, I promptly forgot those words. That’s not to say that I didn’t start new…
Read MoreThe Card
The mother walks to the mailbox, a lightness to her step. Her daughter is expecting a set of stickers, handmade from an artist on Etsy, to be used for a game that she’s constructing. That daughter has been waiting patiently for days, and each time she sees the mother exit the house and reach into…
Read MoreThe One About the Reindeer
This post isn’t for the wee little beasts, unless you want to answer a few questions that deal with a somewhat more mature subject matter. Two Christmases ago, we bought Zoe and Talia a pair of swants. University of Michigan-themed swants to be exact. What are swants exactly? Pants made of sweater material. Apparently these…
Read MoreEven More Words for the New Year 3
This past year, I tried to look at the positive and keep this quote in the back of my mind: When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us. ~Helen Keller 2017 was…
Read MoreThankful
On days when I’m not sure what to write, I sometimes go back to all the words I’ve written (here or on the blog) and see what life was like a year, two years, or even more, ago. I checked to see what was happening around June 8/9 last year; thankfully, I can say, “Not…
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