I’ve tried to go to bed on time for one full week now – is that about right?

Or has it been two weeks?

It’s going alright I guess.

I’m reading more at night and that’s a bonus.  I am rereading Hannah Coulter, you know, after seeing Mr. Berry and all.  (And I’m going to try to read Bonhoeffer, thanks in large part to a nudging from Maggie.)

But I’m writing less for this blog because I’m running out of daylight hours.  (I’m also making horrendous mistakes – like accidentally sending out an unfinished blog post draft from a year and a half ago.  Good grief, guys – delete that thing right now if it popped up in your inbox somehow.  I can’t even stand how mistake-riddled it was.  I hadn’t even finished typing it.)

We’ve been accomplishing school.  It’s so much work, homeschool.  But you already knew that.   I like our days best when we have the privilege of staying home all day and can do our school routine with some degree of regularity and I can have the pleasant little fleeting feeling of getting a job completely finished.  I also like our school days when we are sitting at one of our favorite restaurants, eating crepes and writing poetry and pretending it is spring when it’s actually still winter.  And I like the school days that take us into the woods all day to explore sticks and stones and bugs and trees.  I guess I like them all kind of, for all their different reasons.

My brain cannot even comprehend that the calendar says February for later this week and I wonder just how many things in our lives will be different by the time the next January closes out again in twelve little short months.

My friends Amy and Tyler have these three giant bottles filled with marbles in their house.  Each bottle represents one of their three sons and each marble represents one weekend in the lives of their boys before they graduate and leave home.  It’s too tangible for me to handle it.  I’ll probably never adopt the same visual in our own home because I’m pretty sure my heart couldn’t accept the continued stressful knowledge of the time ticking down.  I already walk around and live and breathe with a ticking clock, an hourglass of running out sand.  But I love the commitment to seizing the time, to not wasting even one weekend, to remembering our children are just short term residents within our walls.

I don’t have a major point to make today.

I just didn’t want another day to slip by without writing.  Because the writing keeps being a part of the process for me.  A part of the process for holding on to the good and purging the bad.

For keeping the awful at bay and for shedding light on what I do, indeed, like best in my own life.

Today certain members of my family battled terrible attitudes and danced around disrespectful words and flirted with rude behavior.  Some overslept and some did sloppy work.  We’re out of cat food and I didn’t want to muster the energy to drive kids to their night time activities.

That is all true.

And.  Here are a few things that made me smile or laugh today:

London held Otto high in the air while they played a special version of “I Spy” that they’ve created.  Mosely made apple cinnamon muffins.  It didn’t rain.  Cloves and cinnamon smells flowing from the kitchen.  A writing assignment overdue finally completed.  Beautiful art created and completed by one of the kids.

It’s been a regular kind of a day.  I’m living a regular kind of a life.

Here’s to being back at the routine, trying again, starting over – for the eightieth time, on schedule bedtimes, routines and breaking routines.

________________________________