The last time we had family pictures taken (thanks again, Butterfly Portrait Studios), I came home with this gem.
A picture that embodied excellence to me.
A reminder.
A challenge.
A portrait of a good mother.
The mother I am, because that is me in the picture.
But more than the mother I am . . . the mother I want to be. ...continue reading
No mother is just a mother. We all have hobbies and interests, even if they’ve been on the back burner so long we’ve about forgotten them. Some of us have side gigs; some of us have little projects we fit in here and there.
I have a few of those, but the one that takes up the most of my time these days is probably the business bookkeeping. I won’t lie, there are quite a few days when I ponder how much extra time I would have if I wasn’t always filling in the cracks with paying bills and entering data and filing invoices. ...continue reading
I don’t know why you read here, and I hope you don’t either because, my word, my 2023 blog posts have been all over the map. Literally.
In January, a house tour in Australia. In February, a book review about Mennonites kidnapped in Haiti and another book review about parenting and brain science.
Let’s not get off track here in March, shall we? 🙂
How about a trip to the zoo . . . Emmett’s first zoo trip. Sebastian’s, too. Even Alec’s first time, although I probably shouldn’t be admitting that. A child not going to the zoo till they’re five years old? When the zoo is literally less than an hour away?
I think we kept saying, Let’s wait till he’s old enough to appreciate it. And then another baby brother would come along, so we’d say, Let’s wait till he’s old enough to appreciate it. And pretty soon, another baby brother came along, and we finally just went. ...continue reading
Do I blog in winter?
I wish.
I was supposed to be blogging every other week this year. I made it to April. Or was it March? And I managed to eke out a few posts after Emmett was born.
And then, silence.
Not silence here, not in my house, certainly not.
Just silence on the blog.
And even now, I literally wiped my wet hands dry and left an overflowing counter of dirty dishes to perch quickly on my chair at the computer and write a few words. ...continue reading
I enjoyed my children today.
I did not enjoy them yesterday.
(Such declarations paint our days in too broad of strokes, but you get the idea.)
I thought about posting this picture with the caption, “Three is so cute, but so hard. Three is so hard, but so cute.” And possibly going into detail about how both phrases capture differently the same sentiment. Cute but hard leaves you with a negative connotation. Hard but cute leaves you with a positive one.
Anyway.
I didn’t, and I’m glad I didn’t because it’s the perfect cover photo for a blog post about how I did not enjoy my children one day and how I did enjoy them the next. ...continue reading
