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The dishes don’t change.
I gripe about washing dishes. My cozy home does not house a dishwasher, so coming to the sink is a slow and necessary act. As I fill the sink, more than once a day, I think about the “more important” things I could be doing. Should be doing. And before I even realize what I’m…
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The sentence that changed the way I teach.
One of the 4th graders in the after-school classroom asked me to help with his homework. “Sure, no problem,” I told him, thinking it would be easy. My math might be a bit rusty, but surely I could manage well enough to help with a single homework page. He pulled out the worksheet and my…
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Accept the mess.
Travis and I have been refinishing the hardwood in our home this summer. It’s been a long process of moving furniture and sanding and vacuuming and scraping and sanding again and curing and waiting and maneuvering narrow pathways in the hallway. I knew what I was getting into from the first moment he peeled back…
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It’s okay to be vanilla.
“I only have two speeds: black coffee and Americanos, or plain ole vanilla lattes,” I told him as we left our weekly coffee stop, vanilla latte in hand and a hint of shame in my voice. Vanilla gets a bad word. She’s the one everyone thinks is boring. Plain. Uninteresting. Vanilla is the opposite of…