Confession.
While feeling profoundly grateful every day for a zillion and thirteen things, I totally dropped the blogging ball this week.
Sorry. And thank you.

Scurrying to make up for lost time, here are some of the things I’ve been thinking about…

12. It can be kind of a pain in the arse to be a grown up sometimes (see: bills, laundry, car maintenance) but really, I’m grateful for the free will that comes along with it (not to be confused with actual control over life — I’m not that delusional). Most days I actually like making up the structure of my own day, deciding what to work on and what to let simmer. I like taking an hour out of my work day to do yoga with the 4th graders, to meet another writer for coffee, to talk to my sister on the phone. I’m grateful for all of this freedom, and I’m grateful for my work and my husband, the two-fer combo that together make my daily life self-determined and pretty swell.

13. I did my last school visit of the calendar year this week and oh, I am so grateful for school visits. There is the fact that they serve as a supplement to a highly erratic and unpredictable writer’s income, but honestly (and I’m not being all starry-eyed simpleton here) I just love the kids. They are so eager. And earnest. And funny. And I have never visited a school and not been told, often in hushed tones, "Miss? I am an author, too." I come home very, very tired but exhilarated and inspired, too. 

14. I love vacation. I love when my kids are on vacation. I love not setting alarms. I love not packing lunches. I love letting everyone stay up a little too late. I love days that are loosey-goosey and either fly by or seem to go on forever (in a good way). I am grateful for weekends and holidays and the academic calendar. Very grateful.

15. I’m still kind of slack-jaw-grateful at how my book, All the World, has been received by parents and teachers and librarians and kids everywhere. In the last couple of weeks alone, I’ve heard from a principal in Massachusetts whose school is using All the World for a school-wide bookclub, a librarian in Michigan whose library system is using it for a city reading event, and countless friends and cousins and strangers who are reading the bilingual version while eating their Cheerios. We never know, when we write this or that, what will happen to those words when we put them out there. Mine were paired with the most exquisite art I’ve ever seen and tended to by a brilliant editor and just really, really warmly received. And I’m grateful.

16. And I’m also grateful for National Novel Writing Month — not because I got an entire novel written (I didn’t) or because I love what I did write (I don’t) but because it shook me way up and I wrote out of my (little tiny) box and I need a little of that every now and again. I wish I had it in me to shake myself up but I’m a fan of routine. I like actual ruts, if the truth be told. So I’m grateful for deadlines, for a little external pressure, for NaNo — for keeping me on my toes and wide awake.

That’s all for now my friends.
Namaste…