A Lifetime of Love

This week brought about the end of the school year, cleaning out lockers and retrieving items from the kids' various schools, returning items to said schools, and lots and lots of rain. Like a lot of rain. Every day. :( Seriously though, this week was a refreshing break after all the emotions of graduation from the week before, as well as the stress of Zoom meetings and school assignments from the weeks prior to that.  I spent a lot of time reading (current read: “Unbroken” by Laura Hillenbrand), meal planning, time in my classroom organizing my lesson files, and preparing for the 4K Art Show at my school. Every year, the preschool holds an event called Family Day. Families come and watch a performance put on by their child’s class and then enjoy a reception. For the 4K students, this also includes an art show. We spend almost the entire semester preparing for the art show. We study an artist and either replicate one of their works or create our own piece based on their st...

If you are like me, you eat the same meals for supper on a regular basis. I call this a "dinner rut." I have been in a dinner rut for a while, and I posted on Facebook that I was looking for new recipes to try. In response to my plea, my amazing sister shared that she was preparing to do a major cooking spree. She shared her plan and gave me some tips, and I decided to research the idea to see if it was something I could do, too. I began by checking out the book Once-A-Month Cooking by Mimi Wilson and Mary Beth Lagerborg from my local library. I read the first chapter to understand the premise behind the book, and I was hooked! The book was a huge help because it provided two 1-month meal plans, two 2-week meal plans, shopping lists, recipes, and cooking day assembly instructions. I originally planned to start with a 2-week cooking cycle to get a feel for doing so much cooking at one time, but decided to go ahead and extend it to a 1-month plan. As suggested in the b...

is the name of the novel I just finished reading. I would consider it as historical fiction as it includes many key events that took place during the Civil Rights Movement. I gotta tell you, it's definitely now one of my Top Ten all-time favorite books. It is so poignant and captures the viewpoints of what it was like to be black in a Southern town during the 1960s. It explores the relationships between white socialites and their housekeepers in Jackson, Mississippi. I guess what made this book so touching to me was that it made me stop and examine my beliefs, both as a child and now as an adult. It also caused me to reflect on the beliefs I have witnessed in others, whether spoken or otherwise. It also reminded me of a time when, during the early 1980s, my family had help in the form of a black woman. We were living in the South, in Texas, and the Civil Rights Movement was not too far removed. I think about our housekeeper every once in a while, how she ...