Laughing at My Future

The students working diligently. So proud of them. Today was our first day of school. Olivia is in 7th grade, Cecilia is in 5th, and Micah is in 3rd, and my goodness is this. mama. tired . No matter how much planning goes into the year, each school day has its own ebb and flow and even the most successful of days can drain a mama at times. Or a dad. Or both. Feel encouraged yet? No? Okay, let me start again. This will be my eighth year of homeschooling one or more of my kids, and to be honest, I'm pretty sure if I were to tally it up, I have logged a lot more failures than successes. In the day-to-day, and even sometimes year-to-year operations, I have spent many a day feeling like I just needed to put myself in timeout for an undetermined amount of time until I could come out with a better attitude because Lord knows I certainly wasn't helping anything when my tantrum over long division matched theirs! (Look, sometimes it's healthy to admit your occasional {read: freq

Photo Credit: Terri Corbett 2020. Wow. This year took the turn that no one saw coming. Life has been flipped upside down on all of us, and left us questioning, reprioritizing, and altering every aspect of our lives. Being forced to define what is and isn't essential - or rather, having someone else's definition of that forced upon us - has caused most of us to see our lives with a whole new set of glasses. And honestly, I hope we never go back. I hope we never go back to forgetting just how vital our first responders and medical community are.   No matter how you feel about the necessity of certain medications, vaccines, or practices, we have seen these incredible people putting their own lives as second priority in a spotlight they've never before been given. Modern medicine has become a crutch, and those in the field have moved into something we barely give second thought to, let alone take time to appreciate and even more, actually thank.  We as a society have taken for