November!

 

I love fall colors so much! Gorgeous! I don't even know where this tree was. I found it on my phone. I took the pic but don't remember where I was at the time.

So...

Lots going on. First a new book launched a couple of days ago. It is doing fine, though nothing like the last book, which was called Elizabeth is Not a Bennet. That one was a BEAST. But this one is doing fine so far.

Our church had a Trunk or Treat ministry on Thursday, Halloween.

Angela manned a table and also did the decorations and made the Flower Face for herself. It comes from a video game. Isn't it cute?

We had about 400 people go through.

Yesterday I went to the funeral of my friends' seven year old son. It was a powerful service and also so incredibly sad. I thought the pastors both did a great job. They didn't speak empty platitudes. They said, yes, we have a Lord and Savior who loves children and this little guy is with the Lord. BUT this is agony for his family. We don't understand it. We may never understand it.

So yeah, that was a hard service. I wish I had brought more Kleenex. I am praying for my friends and also will be available to help them in the future. 

This is funny to me... I have been watching a lot of shows and video clips that have little commercials mixed in. It seems like no one knows who I am because the commercials are absolutely aimed for someone else. I keep seeing a wine commercial. I hate the taste of wine so much. I keep seeing commercials for special shampoo for black women's hair. My hair is straight and boring, not beautifully curly and able to be braided in a fancy way. I also keep seeing Pampers commercials, sometimes in Spanish. WHAT? I mean, yes, I had plenty of babies, but a long time ago!

Rose learned to ride a bike this last week. Yes, it was late but she took to it like a duck to water. Then yesterday she and a couple of other kids were doing the Death Gully Challenge and she crashed into a tree. She is fine though has a bruise on her leg. Like why, kids? Why be so crazy?  Because they are young and full of vim and vigor.

Obviously the election is on Tuesday. A lot of people are stressed, including me. It has, if nothing else, been a whacky election cycle with a previous president running again, and Biden dropping out, and assassination attempts, and other insanity. 

I keep trying to remember that God is God. Sometimes the "wrong" leader comes to power. God is still God.  

We do have seven voting Kendigs and will be doing our part on election day. 

One thing that is regrettable is that people generally ascribe rotten intentions toward people with other views. I can believe someone to be wrong while still understanding the motivation behind it. There can be good intentions which lead to bad outcomes.

Well, we will know soon...

Birthday Week

 

I turned 55 this week. Angela made me a chocolate cake using almond flour, which was excellent. Rose made me a fake little cupcake out of playdough, plus two paper 5's. She is so creative.

My birthday was excellent. Good weather, plus two fun gifts from Kevin, namely a new Kindle and a new Fitbit watch.

Tuesday, some dear friends of ours visited for dinner. We had our 9 children and they had their eight younger children (their eldest lives elsewhere) and we had a wonderful time. We mostly were outdoors on the porch, where we set up tables. The kids haven't seen one another in three years, as our friends were in Germany for military reasons. Now they are back in the area. It was great.

Friday morning...

Sigh...

Friday morning I was doing my devotions when I got a call from a dear friend, and she was crying. She told me that her seven year old had died a few hours previously.

He showed every signs of a stomach bug the previous day and seemed to be improving, and when they got up in the morning, he was dead.

It is just... hard to put into words how wrecked they are. Of course they are. But there are no words.

It was a freak medical thing and not their fault at all. But as she told me, how do we go on?

I honestly don't know. They do have other children so they will go on because they have to, but to lose a child?

It is so easy to get upset and angry and irritated about little things and then when a child dies, suddenly all those little things seem far less important, don't they?

I look around at our children and they have their struggles, but they are alive and healthy and I am so grateful.

I know it is a cliche, but I am hugging my children a bit harder.

So yeah, at the moment I feel sad because my heart breaks for my friend and her husband and other children.

But I did have a good birthday, and am thankful for that.

Mid October

 

Kevin made swings and they are very popular, even with the older kids!

I was hilariously reminded of a scene in the Avengers movie, the first one, where various Avengers are striding toward the camera looking buff and ready to fight.

I think it is wonderful when the posse, the Horde, goes out and walks up and down the driveway together, chattering away as they do so.

We released a book in early October. So far it is shaping up as a Beast, which is to say very popular. It hit like 250 in the Kindle store, which is stupidly good.

Thanks to various odd circumstances, we are almost done with ANOTHER book. I am currently doing second edits on it. I hate second edits so much. I whine every time I have to do it.

Of course, I could just publish as is but second edits make the book much much much better.

So yeah. Why do I dislike it so much? It is hard work, and painstaking, and not fun.

But necessary.  So quit whining, Laraba!

Good things happening

 I decided to separate this blog post from the one full of pictures.

This last week, a bunch of good things happened. Let me start with the one that I am most thankful for.

When Kevin and I were in Michigan at the beginning of our marriage, we were friends with a couple with a large family.

One of their sons was working overseas for some years. Something went wrong recently regarding paperwork, and he ended up being detained and stuck in some rather lousy prison for foreigners with these kinds of issues. The problem in question lingered for literally weeks as our embassy didn't move quickly to sort out the paperwork issues. The young man has some underlying health issues and the prison was not a healthy place. 

I was praying, as were a great many people. Finally he did get the necessary documentation and he returned home in the last week.

So so so thankful. As a mom myself, I cannot imagine how hard this was for the entire family as they worried about him.

That's the biggest win of the week, for sure! 

Other far less important things, but nonetheless I am thankful.

1. I found a pair of my glasses that went missing. They had been gone for weeks and I decided to search my car. Yep, they were under a seat.

2. The Detroit Tigers, "my" baseball team, are on a tear. They have won 30 of the last 41 games or something and are on the cusp of making it to the post season for the first time in a decade. It is likely they will quickly be eliminated but still it is great fun!

3. Lydia is happily installed in her new job and likes it.

4. Our books are doing well. We have a new book launching next week and there is a lot of buzz around it. Of course, the buzz is partially because Kevin is doing an AWESOME job of promoting the book. But even aside from that, apparently people are pretty excited about the concept. It is a trope called "Elizabeth is Not a Bennet". Basically Elizabeth is adopted by the Bennets instead of being a Bennet daughter.

5. We got rain! Lots of it!  So so thankful!

I tend to focus on the things that aren't great sometimes, which isn't good. So right now I am thinking about how thankful I am for all these wonderful things that have happened recently.

 

End of September

Our cats are cute. 

Gorgeous skies one night. Obviously the pool is still open. It is getting cold though.

Kevin tore down our playset that we acquired like 17 years ago. It was falling apart and not safe. Then he decided to construct some swings for our front yard. After figuring out everything including making diagrams and using geometry...

Voila!

Cogburn is still hanging around looking happy. He is also very loud but he is so adorable we don't mind. Much.

Rose played with the train set this week. It is funny; a toy will sit in a corner for literally months and I will think, hmmm, maybe we should get rid of it...

And then the kids get excited.

Kevin did a great job with the garden this year. We had a drought but he watered very faithfully so we got lots of squashes. We are also getting many green beans still which makes me SO happy!

After aforementioned drought, we finally have been getting rain, which is a huge relief. There were dangers of wildfires and now the ground is nicely wet and the water table is probably a lot better.

So we are thankful for that!

 

 

Mid September

 It is hot out there! It has been a hot and very dry month. We are praying for rain.

Our pool is getting colder thanks to longer and chillier nights. That makes it easier to keep under control as colder water doesn't grow as much algae. On the downside, fewer Kendigs are willing to jump in because it is less comfortable.

This is a large bin FULL of crumpled paper. Yesterday I finished my edits of the latest book. Now I am basically done with that one and Kevin will take it from here. Hooray!

I have another book that is already 64,000 words long. I set it aside a few weeks ago to finish Elizabeth is Not a Bennet (the latest book) and now need to start it up again. It needs some more drama so I am thinking about adding a plot thread.

Lydia started her new job today. She battled major health issues for months and has been steadily improving so that makes us all very happy! She is a receptionist now.

I usually don't get political on this blog and will just touch on a couple of things today. First, I am sad and worried that another person tried to assassinate Trump. It is crazy and scary. The man in question seems totally delusional and screwed up.

Another thing is that Springfield Ohio has been in the national news due to some things that came up in the debate. Springfield is only 15 miles from us. Kevin technically grew up in Springfield, though actually his house was the first one beyond the line of Enon, Ohio.

There is a genuine struggle in Springfield because an incredible number of Haitian immigrants have been settled there. Through no fault of their own, they don't speak English. Through no fault of their own, they don't know how to drive. The social resources are strained beyond the breaking point.

Lots of Christians on my Facebook feed are calling for love toward these people, and they are, of course, right. There are ministries working to help them in various ways.

Since we live so close to Springfield, one obvious question is -- what am I called to do to help these people?

The answer is, nothing.

That sounds dismissive, but I pray often for God's wisdom on what I am supposed to be doing in this season of life. My primary job is to care for my children. Given that there are many of them, and given that I am also writing a lot, and given my own emotional and mental make-up, I definitely cannot spend time doing ministry in Springfield.

Kevin and I and the kids are involved in a pantry ministry at our church (not in Springfield) but that is a small thing, only once a month.

The children do more than Kevin and I do with ministry; the older ones, I mean.

When I was a young mother, I was told by wise people around me that teenagers love to talk into the late evening about difficult topics. And I thought, I sure hope not! I am totally a morning person and am brain dead at night.

They were right. Last night I ended up talking at length with two kids (separately) about some emotional issues.

That was good. That was my job. 

I love Ecclesiastes 3

There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

2     a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3     a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
4     a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
6     a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7     a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8     a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

Kevin and I are in a LONG season of raising children. I am guessing many people don't make such heavy weather of it. I think we are doing a very good job but it is hard work for us. I am confident that if I devoted myself to ministries outside the home, my parenting and teaching would suffer.

So yeah. I am praying for Springfield but I am not doing anything else during this season of life.

Latest Book

 I have finished another book! The last one I wrote, Handsome Enough to Tempt Him, was finished in late June and was only released last week. That is because we were having someone do a simulatenous audio book and had to wait for her to do it.  There were other reasons but I don't know them. Part of the reason our writing partnership works is that Kevin does a bunch of stuff and I do a bunch of stuff and we leave certain decisions to the other person.

Kevin decides on when to publish.

The next book is coming out in like, three weeks. Wow! So we will have two long books a month apart!

Current one is sitting at over 100K words. I kept telling Kevin this book was going to be short, and then it wasn't.

This is very common for me, by the way.

I dislike this part of the writing process the most. I have to do a full edit of the book and keep track of disparate threads of the plot. I wrote the epilogues a few days ago, and then realized I had entirely forgotten a very important original character and had to insert him back in!

I have random notes on my desk to remind myself of names and details.

We print out the entire book on paper, and then Angela does an edit on paper, and I do a follow up edit on paper, and then I put the corrections into the Word document.

I cannot express how much I dislike this process. It is tedious and requires a lot of attention.

A couple of books ago, I discovered that when I finish a page, it gives me a blip of happy chemicals to rip it out of the binder, crumple it up, and throw it on the floor. So that is what I do.

I have thought long and hard about how blessed I am to be able to do this job. Lots of people cannot. I have major areas of weakness -- athletics, art, imagining battlefields -- but I can write! I can come up with interesting plots and keep track of all the threads pretty well. I make the occasional mistake but I am definitely pretty good at it.

And I didn't do anything to make that happen. I work very hard and I persevere and I am disciplined, bu the actual ability is a gift.

I am grateful. 

And... back to work on editing!