This is the first picture of all of our children all together ever. That in itself is a huge achievement, there's more however. I know it's been a long time since I posted on here, and I hope that I can manage to work it in to my busy life again because I enjoyed this outlet tremendously. In the last two years we have been able to bring Chris home to live with us, we moved into our first home (one of our own that is, not a rental), I went back to work full time, and my husband was finally able to quit his second job and pick up a more normal schedule working only one job.
It has been a long pull, and a hard one too, but I think that makes it all the more worth it now. I think the thing that I am most proud of is the fact that both Chris and Junior (who are 18 and 17 respectively) are still in school. Both should have been graduating this year, but due to a lack of credits, were unable to do so. This happens to lots of kids every year, they either miscalculate what credits are needed and fall short, or they struggle in classes and are just unable to pass them the first time through. In some cases, kids slip through the cracks and manage to get pushed through to the next grade every year only to reach senior year with little to no credits and no hope of graduating. Our boys fall into to of these categories, Chris into the last one, a victim of a system that didn't care, and Junior into the category of kids that struggle but just fall short in the end. My pride is in the fact that unlike a lot of kids, our boys are sticking to it. They both will be going back to school in the fall, and with hard work should both graduate with the class of 2014.
In all of this, my writing fell by the way, I would write when I was unhappy or when I was angry. Sometimes I wrote when I wanted to escape, but I didn't allow my writing to consume me the way I did when I wrote my novel
Crossroads. None of the things I have written have flowed from me in such a torrent, but I did try my hand at a children’s story for my youngest daughter, Frances, and I enjoyed that very much. I'm still toying with the ending, and then I think I'll go to the local community college and see if I can find an art student to illustrate it for me. I have also begun a major overhaul of my novel, trying to get it suitable for publication (I haven't had any interested publishers, but I was thinking I might just pay to have it published on my own). It's funny that my novel flowed out of me so effortlessly at the time, but re-reading it with the perspective lent by the passage of time shows me how much my writing style has changed. I still feel passionately about the story line and plot of my novel, I just think that I'm going to need to put in a lot of time re-working it so that it can be more easily read and understood, and maybe even eventually successful.
