“Mom, I need you to pray with me about something.” It’s the first thing she says to me—she who is both daughter and sister by grace, she standing framed by the car window, the afternoon sun making her hair all blazing light.  The breeze rushes in, stealing the heat. I smile, nodding.  “Okay.  What shall […]

Adam had been talking about this trip for a week–father and son, side-by-side in a pick-up truck, on their way to the beach. To say that Adam has been talking about anything just makes me smile, because nothing sounds as sweet as his voice, nor does anything touch us quite like his earnest efforts to […]

Five o’clock on the beach, and the light falls soft and golden on our shoulders. It doesn’t escape me that on normal days, this hour finds me weary and pushing through, juggling homework and dinner and a thousand other things, counting the moments until I can sit down.  Usually around five I can feel the […]

Morning quiet, the day all new, and as Kevin and I sit eating breakfast in small savored bites, sipping coffee hot and steaming, Adam comes, carrying his notebook. He lays it out purposefully on the table next to Kevin’s place, spreading flat the pages of favorite finished worksheets, pressing his finger into the paper, pointing […]

I’m back from a run, my pulse still elevated, sweat dripping. “Mom?  You’re sweaty.” Riley’s voice rises from the living room, where she sits waiting on me, her pencil moving over a workbook in her lap.  Before I leave, every run, she asks me where I’ll be running, rehearses the steps with me street by […]

This is the first year that Adam has been able to tell me what he wants for Christmas.  Just a few weeks ago, I stood in the kitchen wrapping my arms around my nine year old son, who laughed but squirmed with discomfort.  I kissed him on the cheek and smiled into bright blue eyes […]

This morning, Adam couldn’t find his favorite math worksheet. “Three Steps?” he said to me, his face a few inches from mine, his body leaning in to where I sat sipping my coffee on the porch. Adam and I had communicated enough about Three Steps in the last week for me to know (finally) that this […]

Zoe is a prayer warrior.  And frankly, she absolutely schools the rest of us. For about three years, the motor on the power door in our van was burned out.  When the girls were younger, they thought it fun to engage the door and then watch it jerk back in the other direction when they […]