Happy New Year! And happy first post since last September!

Yeah, I slacked a bit. I got tangled in the quandary of how to share our adoption story (both the lead up and the present day) while protecting our kids’ privacy, and ended up I blogging nothing at all. Sorry about that. (Sorry both that I disappeared, and that I don’t have a record of all that happened.) Because Holy Guacamole, 2016 was a year.

Perhaps the best metaphor (simile? comparison? Who cares.) for this past year is the Geico commercial with the figure skating sumo wrestler.  It’s entirely strange…so very awkward…and yet kind of funny once you just let yourself go with it.

This is how I’ve felt every day of this past year.

We became parents and planted a church. I started writing book #3 again, giving up on a narrative arc and just tossing the whole crazy salad into a collection of essays. (Topics include the winter I was obsessed with Fleetwood Mac, how I still believe praying for a husband is worth it, and how helicopter parents have ruined everything for the rest of us.) I’m also writing a novel because I need something to progress in an orderly fashion where I know it will all turn out okay.

I learned to cook dinner (almost) every night, preach (almost) every Sunday, and delete (all) recruitment emails from the PTA. I’ve filed a 501(c)(3) application and confirmed that I’m not liturgical. I’ve watched #1 Cherub go off to learn golf with my Dad, #2 Cherub paint my Mom’s fingernails in super-sparkle polish that wouldn’t come off for three months, and Steve struggle to keep a straight face (just this morning) when one of them said, “But no one TOLD me not to build a snow slide off the backyard table that went straight into a tree!”

It’s not been dull.

And as much as I’ve slacked on blogging, I’m grateful to be able to share glimpses of all of this. One of my favorite quotes is something Madeleine L’Engle wrote in Walking on Water, about how we should work to live a life that doesn’t make sense unless God is real.

Checkmark on that for 2016 :)