Summer Break!

    Well, this first day of summer break is starting off exactly as expected: two kids who are already cranky with each other after an hour being awake, and I got no sleep. Sounds awful, right? Except for the fact that we have absolutely, positively, wonder-f'n-fully nowhere to go today! They can be cranky! I can be tired! We can all spend the day grounded in our rooms! Who cares!
    This, this part right now, is the part of summer break that I was so excited for lol.

    The other part is that my kids are still small enough to want to hang out with me, and big enough to do things with without having to pack an Everything Bag, everywhere. We don't have a high bar for stuff we like doing (we're not a regularly camping / hiking / daredevil family by any stretch of the imagination), but some bike riding is – and days at the local trampoline park may be – in our future. There are some great playgrounds around our house, and I kept phone numbers of other parents from birthday parties so we have the ability to set up for kid play dates if timing works out with the other families. 
    Plus, I've been able to already get a handful of short stories drafted up. Back in high school (like, way, way back there for me) I had a really great English teacher by the name of Mr Jordan. Knowing that we would be tested on our ability to compose long answers and essays at the end of Grade 12, probably three or four times a month we would come in to class and he would have written a single word on the chalkboard. Whatever that word was, we had the class to compose an essay, short fiction, or short non-fiction about that word. I got lucky enough to have Mr Jordan for two years, and by the end of Grade 12 my skills had been honed really well to imagine up a story based on the word of the day.
    The difference now is that I don't have to be limited to that small block of time we had for class. All those big, novel-sized ideas I've written during my school years and since then have trained me to write bigger, fuller ideas. Rather than eight hundred words in an hour, it's eight thousand over two days. Or it's two thousand in one day and still having time for sneaking in a load or two of laundry (or for grabbing an extra word from a friend's three year old to spur on a cute kid's story).

Jenny Reaper and her brother, Cory, have been through a lot to say the least, but so far they've survived. They've even rebuilt their lives after losing their parents and almost each other. Nothing is perfect, and things don't always come out right, but love means anything can be possible!

    The funny similarity to my days back in Mr Jordan's high school English class is that I still can't, to this day, give myself the word of the day. Trying to do it myself actually gave me writer's block this past Christmas. This summer break, I'm ignoring my writer pride's demands that I come up with every original idea completely by myself and I've been asking friends and family to give me random words. (Or, in the case of my youngest, a random letter lol.) Not only has it made for fun conversations to tell people about the stories spinning out of their words, I'm having a great time writing up a ton of new content for blogging.
    I can't wait to start sharing this stuff with you in September! Hope you have a great weekend!