DID YOU HEAR? THE KIDS ARE BACK IN SCHOOL

Hello there! Remember me?

I know it's been a long time...but I'm still here and looking forward to this new season. Did you hear, the kids are back in school!

But that doesn't mean that this morning didn't come very early.

The alarm was not a welcomed sound, and I probably would have turned it off and rolled over except that it signaled the beginning of my kids' first full day of school. Oh. My. Goodness.

There were years that the end of summer came with tears and tantrums—I can only account for mine. It used to be I never wanted the summer to end and see my kids go back to school. Not so much this year. Last week, they started the new school year with three half days. It was so cute to watch my teen and tween walk into school today holding hands. All that cuteness aside, it seemed, however, that as soon as we dropped them off at school they needed to be picked up again.

Don’t get me wrong, it was great to get them out of the house even for a short time. There have been very few days over the past 17 months that they were both outside of the house for any amount of time with me watching them from the safety of my second-story office window. Sure the pandemic had a little something to do with that, and then our hot and humid summer took care of the rest of that. They were housebound by choice. Monkey Boy has become an expert at Roblox and knows just about all the lyrics to every song ever written.

But then, along comes the new school year, and my kids are seated four and half days a week with teachers and other students. That means, five dark and early, early mornings, a sacrifice I am willing to make in the name of education and the promise of some much-needed alone time.

I almost don’t know what to do. Except I really do know what to do. I have a new book that’s going to be published later this year. It’s called More Ordinary, a follow-up to my first book Everyday Ordinary: )Mostly) True Confessions of Marriage, Shoe Shopping and How I Keep Losing the Mother of the Year Award. (If you haven’t read Everyday Ordinary yet, you totally should! I say that because I love that book, and I think everyone, everywhere would love it, too!) I can’t wait to share this new book with you—it’s full of stories about love and kids and faith and those ordinary family moments that made us all laugh our way through Everyday Ordinary.

And I should mention, too, that later this year, I also have a vegan cookbook coming out. I’ll give you more details on that project later!