The Negative Loop From Hell

Life has been feeling pretty overwhelming lately. If I haven’t given out that vibe, just look back at the fluffy blog posts I’ve been publishing, trying to avoid talking about it. I’m not sure why it seems so much harder right now. Really, not all that much has changed. Maybe this is what people mean…

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The Challenge of Achieving Zen When Your Kids Are Wrestling On The Floor

I spent last week hobnobbing with my fellow liturgical composers…which means I got to geek out about hanging out with people I have looked up to since I was old enough to pay attention to the names in the copyright line at the bottom of the hymnal pages. And yes, I am fully aware that…

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New Year, Not Exactly New Adventures

Well, I had all but decided to quit blogging as of January 1st. But I tossed off a quick post about Julianna and—gasp—a whole bunch of people read it. So I’m entering 2017 with a willingness to keep on keeping on, although I think I’m going to be more off-the-cuff than I have been in…

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Living Slow

Sometimes life seems like a full-on sprint. I take a deep breath, as I did on Tuesday afternoon last week, and comfort myself that this is the worst a Tuesday is ever going to get, this school year. Or I have a Saturday like this past weekend, in which nothing was scheduled and consequently I…

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The Grace to Let Enough be Enough

“What come next?” There was a period of several months recently when Julianna was constantly asking this question: when a song ended on a CD, at the end of a scene in a movie, whenever we got back in the van after running an errand or going to a lesson. Lately, it feels like the…

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We Weren’t Made To Live Like This

When you have four kids, life is going to be busy, simply by definition. But Christian and I have not given up the things we were doing before kids came along, and we were busy then. When I first quit working, I was a bona fide stay at home mom. Now, I work from home,…

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Cross-Bleed

I’m not sleeping well lately. Bizarre, disturbing dreams. Waking at three a.m. and lying awake for hours. Sometimes giving up and pulling out the laptop to work for an hour and a half before I finally crash again, thirty minutes before the alarm goes off. After Monday’s post I realized my problem is cross-bleed. Here’s how my…

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