I’ve learned what to expect when I take my kids for a walk: my three-year-old hits the ground at a sprint. He charges into the wide world at full tilt, without a plan and without fear. He just has to run. He is a doer. His sister, on the other hand, ambles along with her…
Confession: When I first got serious about writing, I did the coffee shop thing. I’d take my laptop down to the corner Panera and park myself in front of the gas fireplace with the other soup-lovers and pound away at the keys, feeling more confident with every passing minute that I was a Real Author….
When I was nine years old, my family moved to the middle-of-nowhere, Texas. There, in the hundred-degree heat of my first Texas summer, I made friends with nature. Our new home was a worn, yellow house on two hundred scraggly acres of crackly grass, fields bristling with cedar, and low brown hills occasionally decked in…
I walked up to the registration table at a conference for children’s book writers and illustrators. The lobby was filled with teachers talking to one another about their schools, their principals, and common core. A few talked over their manuscripts. The woman behind the table was cheerful and warm. She smiled at me like I…
I wrote this a couple of years ago, and shared it here. As this winter turns more drab and grey than white, and spring hovers tantalizingly just out of sight, I thought it might be a good time to dust it off for another reminder. – JDW I graduated from a small liberal arts college,…
I am pregnant with our fourth child. Our five-year-old daughter all but demanded, upon threat of secession, a baby sister instead of a third brother. But the grainy ultrasound revealed our coming son, miniaturely and precisely detailed, wiggling arms and legs at the very joy of having them. Within me, God is sculpting a delicate…
“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” I’ve just finished a draft of a new book. It’s thrilling to see a world wake…
I was cleaning out a box of stuff in my youngest son’s bedroom when I found a homemade book — five or six pieces of white paper folded in half and stapled down the middle to make a spine. The pages were packed with little kid drawings and some words to a story. My organized…
Star Wars fever has swept the planet, and my family has not been immune. We watched the original movies (IV, V, and VI for you hard-core fans) and now my kids are bounding around scream-singing John Williams’s inspired melodies and motifs. It’s sort of amazing. Seeing the old movies again has brought to mind an…
Kids notice everything. Sometimes this can be problematic. Yesterday, for instance, my four-year-old was horrified by some imperfection in a stranger’s complexion at the grocery store. “Mama, what was that THING on that man’s face?” And of course, the man with the thing on this face was still well within earshot. But my kids’ keen…
September and October have been wild for us. We launched into a new year of homeschooling. We traveled to Wyoming with friends. We hosted a houseful of guests for a conference. I prepared a talk, edited and reworked about a thousand pages of fiction, and kept up a constant stream of communication with my new…
The first time I walked through that very ordinary doorway, I entered a portal into a different world. It was an unexpected discovery, a world of beauty and grace. Girls lined up against the wall like dominos in a row, one behind the other. Alone, each was not so different than me. Wispy girls with…
