With all of the rain we’ve had lately, my son Ezra and I have noticed a common sight dotting the sidewalks while we’re on our way to school in the mornings—earthworms. Most have baked into a crispy twig in the hot sun, but a few still have a little wriggle in them. Ezra rescues the […]
Somewhere between 4th grade and 7th grade, it was a common pastime for girls in my school to rank their friends. “Tiffany is my first best friend. Holly is my second best friend. You are my third best friend.” Unless you were number one, it was demoralizing and humiliating, but you also knew your place […]
There are a lot of things to love about Easter—chocolate bunnies, new dresses, egg hunts, spring blossoms—but the thing I love the most is reading the account of Christ’s resurrection. As a perpetual optimist, I’m a big fan of happy endings, and that’s what we get when we keep reading the Gospels after the events […]
When you’re the youngest kid in a family, it’s inevitable that you’ll end up with an eclectic treasure trove of toys/junk. At least that’s the case for our youngest son, Ezra. His three older siblings amassed plenty of plastic figurines during their early childhood, and now those Happy Meal toys and army men and Fisher-Price […]
With my recent COVID-19 diagnosis, I acquired a strange, unwelcome gift—the loss of my senses of smell and taste. First of all, you should know that I’m kinda famous (at least within the confines of my own mind) for my uncanny ability to smell things. I even wrote a fictional character in my middle grade […]
As a homeowner, there are plenty of jobs most of us just don’t enjoy doing: weed-eating, grout-cleaning, baseboard-dusting, etc. Generally, these are tasks which run on a never-ending loop: We clean. We pause briefly to bask in the triumph of our accomplishment. Then, before we know it, it’s time to do it again. Cleaning […]
At my church, we’ve been studying the book of Deuteronomy. Last week, we heard a sermon from Deuteronomy 6, which contains one of my favorite verses, a passage I was taught to memorize at a very young age: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul […]
I’m in the process of teaching our 15-year old son how to drive. Since this is the third kid for me to teach this particular lesson, I know there’s a lot of important information to cover. There are the basics—which pedal is the gas and which is the brake, how to switch on the wipers […]
Our youngest son was recently interested in the game “Would You Rather?” In it, a person asks another person questions like: “Would you rather have one thumbnail pulled off or all your eyelashes plucked out?” It’s meant to be a difficult task, choosing between two mostly equal options. But when Ezra posed the questions, he […]
As we watched a complicated battle scene in the new Mulan movie a few nights ago, my youngest son said, “It would be hard to be an actor.” Assuming he was referring to the acrobatics required to do things like flip around on the back of horses while shooting arrows at a pursuing enemy, […]