What have I been doing?
In short, I’ve been doing a lot. Keep reading for the long version. 
I’m not sure if I mentioned it, but I homeschool my children. I LOVE every (well, maybe not EVERY, but almost every) minute. Being able to provide a personalized, challenging, well-rounded education to my sons is a blessing. It is hard some days, but it is always so worth it. Childhood is fleeting. I get to spend more time with my young’ns and see their faces light up when they have those Aha! moments or when they are learning about things that they are interested in. My homeschool style is eclectic, so while some of our curricula are boxed sets, others are pieced together or made by me. I plan it all out (in pencil) in my teacher planner. There’s the occasional printing and copying and lots of grading to be done. Field trips and extracurricular activities, let’s not forget about those…
There are also the day-to-day tasks and errands: cooking meals, cleaning/decluttering/organizing, tending to the garden and critters, cleaning and canning or cooking the harvest (we’ve been blessed this year and had plenty to share with our neighbors as well), budgeting, paying bills, grocery shopping, keeping appointments–you know, all the adulting things that make the world go round. Then there’s making time to keep in touch with family and friends and spending quality time with our little family, too. These are things everyone does and I’m sure there are people out there that do more and do it better (especially in the time-management area).
Besides all of the aforementioned, my kids are helping me illustrate my picture book, Zombiesaurs. I just signed up for Craftsy and took a great class, The Art of the Picture Book with Shadra Strickland. It was a great class that gave me tons of useful information and inspiration and I highly recommend it. I signed up for a free course through Reedsy, Developing Characters That Your Readers Will Love. And I’m working to complete the online course, Write Storybooks for Children, which I started many moons ago.
And…I’m not finished. You’re not a writer if you don’t write. I already have a lot going on, and if I don’t make time to write, no one is going to do it for me. So, I challenged myself to accept (nearly) every writing challenge I came across over the next couple of months: story contests, poetry contests, anthology submissions, etc. And you know what? It’s paid off. A ghost story I wrote was chosen for a walking ghost tour. (That totally made my day, btw!) I am now a contributing blog writer for Pikes Peak Writer’s Writing from the Peak (yay! Check out my first blog here.) Why in the world am I doing all this at once?
I’m probably crazy. But I needed something to get me in gear. I’ll probably slow down on the challenges for a bit over the holidays, but I do have some deadlines and goals to meet before the end of the year. I’m still working on a chapter book and the next two books in The Magic Telescope Series. I’m also learning to make websites so I can build my own at some point in the future.
To be honest, this isn’t even all I’ve been doing. There’s a ton more, but I’ll save that for another post. Maybe in the meantime, I can work a little more on time management and keeping this blog up while making it a tad more grammatically correct. 
God bless!
“May love and laughter light your days, and warm your heart and home. May good and faithful friends be yours, wherever you may roam. May peace and plenty bless your world with joy that long endures. May all life’s passing seasons bring the best to you and yours!”
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