1. There has been so much going on this month besides trying to get the last book in Untamed Series out (and I’m about to do one last read-through before I hand it off to my editor—woohoo!). I’m looking forward to finishing and taking a break. And working on something else…which apparently I will have plenty of time to do over the next two months because soccer season is starting, and my three older kids are playing on two different teams. They were split between two different teams last year, too, but the practices were thankfully all on the same 2 weeknights. This year? No such luck. So I’m looking at 4 nightly practices a week for the next 8-10 weeks, with games on Saturday and Sunday. Which means I’ll have ONE day a week that I won’t have to go anywhere (as opposed to my normal of having NO weekly commitments—I know so many of you have kids doing different sports all year long, always going in seventeen different directions…and I have no idea how you do that all the time. I can barely handle soccer season once a year.). On the bright side, however, that means 6 hours/week of quiet writing time in the car at practices, and lots of time to knit during games on the weekends.
Making lemonade, my friends. Lots and lots of lemonade.
2. We went to Vermont where we spent good time with family, I got to catch up with a dear friend from high school who I haven’t seen for far too many years, we walked through the woods, staked out a pond to see herons and egrets, and picked lots of blueberries.
There was plenty of eating of blueberries, too.
We haven’t been back for a vacation-y visit for a couple of years. It was a good trip.
3. This spring, much to our dismay, the only other family with kids on our road moved away. A couple of months later, however, they rented their house to another family who just moved here from Virginia, and we finally met them last week. They are all absolutely lovely, and our kids have made fast friends. What’s funny, though, is the mom’s name is Trina, short for Katrina. A very unusual name, and it also happens to be the name of my brother’s wife. So every time I see my new friend Trina, I can’t help but think about my brother and sister-in-law.
4. And I’ve been doing a LOT of thinking about my brother and sister-in-law lately, because it’s been almost a year since John passed. My parents were here this week while we celebrated my oldest’s birthday, and as we were sitting around the table talking and laughing, I was looking at my newly-minted 12 year old son and couldn’t help thinking about my parents losing their son.
It still feels so fresh, even a year later.
5. And I think my brother may be trying to tell me something. I took my neighbor Trina up to my favorite Mennonite store yesterday (because it’s one of the many gems in this area). On the drive back home, I ended up behind a car with a Quebec license plate. I have NEVER before seen a Quebec plate here in central New York. I see them all the time in the Burlington, VT, area, but never here. So, it was really strange. And it’s HIGHLY significant to me in relation to my brother—I wrote a post about the phrase “Je me souviens” on Quebec plates the weekend I visited John after finding out he was at the end of his cancer battle.
I was sitting there staring at that car in front of me, tears running down my face, and thinking Je me souviens, John. Don’t worry, je me souviens.
Hope you all have a wonderful weekend. <3
Love you :) that is really cool.
<3 <3 <3