When it comes to places to live, Kansas is not very glamorous. Nobody has ever said, “Wow, I bet it’s beautiful there,” or “I’ve always wanted to live there,” when they find out where my home is.
I get it. I’ve been around the country, and Kansas is a bit boring compared with the rest of the states. One thing I do love about living here, though, is the fact that we have four distinct seasons.
There it was, in the subject line of a promotional email from the photo company we’d used to print Lilly’s senior pictures: “Don’t forget about dad.” The timing made sense, given that Father’s Day was less than two weeks away. But when I read it, I couldn’t escape the irony. …
Last week, I wrote about metaphorical wake-up calls—how they don’t have an expiration date, and how responding to mine involves learning to be OK with not knowing how the story is going to end. I don’t have a tried-and-true strategy for doing this, of course. But right around the time …
At our house, we have one daughter who usually gets up in the morning before her alarm goes off, so she rarely needs a wake-up call. Meanwhile, just down the hall, daughter No. 2 hits snooze numerous times and often doesn’t actually leave her bed until we throw open her …
My girls are pretty self-reliant when it comes to managing their schoolwork, so when our district cancelled in-person classes and switched to online learning, I wasn’t overly involved in their education during the next eight weeks. I copyedited an English paper for my senior and watched a few snippets of …
Dear Lilly, Last August, you started saying things like, “This time next year, I’ll be at college,” or, “This is my last first day of high school,” or, “I’m going to miss you so much when I leave.” To your parents, it seemed surreal—that after 12 years of school and …