Hey there! Around the end of June I wrote to you all that I would be taking most of the rest of the summer off from writing in the newsletter, and I snuck back in a bit a couple of weeks ago with my timely piece on Maggie going to kindergarten and then had to go after Meta again last week. In fact, I planned to run this piece last week, but delayed it so I could tackle the latest Meta malfeasance.
So anyway I’m officially back now! I figured I could update you on what’s been going on with us lately.
A Family Update
It’s been a busy summer for our family.
We had a great July 4th holiday week together. I took a bit of time off, and we had a couple of fun Independence Day parties with friends from church. Lots of good food, more fireworks in our neighborhood at later hours than our girls would prefer, and lots of time together. Maggie attended a “princess dance camp” during which all the kids dressed up as princesses and learned to dance like princesses. It was Maggie’s first exposure to dance classes. She had a great time, but for now we’re going to stick to gymnastics and piano. When she learned that not every class is a princess dance class, she was less than enthusiastic to continue.
Later in July we spent about 10 days running around Indiana visiting all kinds of family and friends. We spent a few days with my family in Indianapolis and then made our way up I-69 to spend time with the rest of our family in Fort Wayne, squeezing in a vital stop at Taylor University—our alma mater—and Ivanhoe’s along the way.
Upon returning home from Indiana the last week of July, it was time to set our feet and get ready to send Maggie off to kindergarten. We bought school supplies, attended a couple of different orientation gatherings at school, and got ready for the big day.
Maggie had her first day of kindergarten on Thursday, August 14th, and though the first couple of days were emotional, everyone has gotten into the swing of things and she’s been having a great time. She is making friends and developing new kinds of independence every day.
In addition to starting kindergarten, Maggie has been attending a music program each week since she was about two-years-old, learning the building blocks of music theory and how to play instruments. This year she starts the piano portion of that program, and she’s been enjoying the keyboard we’ve installed in her room. She seems to have a knack for it, so we hope she continues to enjoy it. She also loves her weekly gymnastics class—we just wish she would sometimes keep a closer eye on her surroundings when she practices at home.
Daisy, we think, has been struggling with Maggie’s new stage in ways that are difficult for a not-quite-two-year-old to communicate. Since basically the first day of kindergarten for Maggie, Daisy has been acting out a lot more than normal, having trouble letting me put her to bed at night (crying for Susie once I put her down), and just generally being more disagreeable than usual. Given her age, this grouchiness and difficulty could obviously be due to a number of factors, but given the timing and the fact that it just kinda came out of nowhere, it’s been hard to not see it as her attempt at coping with not having her sister around very much. We’re hoping she adjusts sooner rather than later. Daisy just started her first music class in the same program Maggie has attended for the last few years. We don’t anticipate Daisy will have the same trepidation Maggie had early in her time there, but time will tell.
In less than a month we will celebrate Daisy’s second birthday, which feels like it’s hard to believe, but she is regularly mistaken for a two-year-old at playgrounds and such. So, honestly, I’ve been thinking of her as a two-year-old for a while. She talks a lot and is pretty physically adventurous for someone who isn’t even two yet. Second child benefits, I suppose.
This season is tiring, to be sure, and it isn’t without its challenges, but we have been enjoying it. Susie is better at enjoying this season than I am. Sometimes I get frustrated because I don’t always get as much time to read and write as I would like, but I’ve come to be at peace with that after it was a real struggle for me in the early years of parenting.
I’ve become content with just having whatever time I get to read or write in the evenings, and I’ve been good about getting as much out of my mornings before the girls wake up, too. Susie and I both know that even amid the difficulties and exhaustion of this season we will one day look back on this time wistfully and long for it (or at least parts of it). So we’re trying to treasure it in the present, not just down the line.
That said, let’s talk about the summer of reading and writing!
Reading and Writing Updates
Let’s get the writing updates out of the way: I didn’t write much! Well, that’s not totally true. I wrote a ton for projects that aren’t really public or even under my name (or anyone’s name). After a pretty slow spring on the contract work front, a number of requests came in this summer for some bigger contract work writing projects that took up a lot of writing time and energy. I am grateful for the extra cash, and getting paid to write is my favorite kind of work—I’d do it all the time if I could—but it did keep me from writing almost anything for myself. I did make some meager progress on probably my most-publishable fiction idea, and honestly I am hoping to turn some more attention to that soon now that I feel I have a bit of a foothold in it. It’s just really hard to pour so much time and effort into something that may never be enjoyed by others, especially at this stage of life when time is so hard to come by. Alas, I want to keep plugging away at it.
Despite my general lack of personal writing productivity, earlier this month I preached at my church for the first time in a while. My assigned text was Luke 9:46-48, and I was asked to emphasize the importance of investing in younger people as the body of Christ. We jumped around a handful of texts, but eventually landed in Luke 9 and spent a good bit of time there. I really enjoyed preaching, and though I was concerned about being a bit rusty—I hadn’t preached since before COVID—I think it went pretty well! You can listen here.
I also had the opportunity to spend some of my Saturday two weeks ago with the youth ministry leaders at the Southeast Youth Leaders Conference. This is one of my favorite events that I’ve been able to speak at over the years, and it was nice to get back together with those folks after taking a year off. Youth ministry leaders are just, generally, wonderful people. I spoke to them on this research that I wrote about back in the spring, and how it could impact the ways they do youth ministry.
For my reading time this summer, I finally finished reading through a handful of C. S. Lewis books that I had never read by knocking out The Great Divorce just last week. Out of all of these smaller, lesser-known books of his that I read over the spring and summer, Letters to Malcolm was my favorite, to be sure. I reflected on some of that one here right before I headed out for the summer.
Much of my summer reading has been caught up in the massive Ron Chernow biography on Mark Twain. It is over a thousand pages long, and I just finished it this past weekend. Some parts of it were a a slog, which I suppose is to be expected in such a huge volume, but it was super compelling! I am sure I will figure out a way to write about it here a bit at some point. Twain has always intrigued me, but I admit that I knew very little about him coming in to this book. For instance, I knew he was a great speaker, but I didn’t realize just how much he was known for speaking compared to his writing, especially early on. Twain basically pioneered stand-up comedy mixed with TED talks before anyone knew such things would exist.
Anyway, Chernow writes this biography in such a way that when the girls are down for the evening, all I want to do most nights is open the book and teleport back to the turn of the 20th century so I can read more about the travels and trials of this American icon. I really enjoyed it, but I am grateful to be finished—I tend to not like to read more than two non-fiction books at a time, and this one has taken up a slot for about three months!
I’m not typically one to read business-adjacent, self-help sorts of books unless they come highly recommended—a lot of books could be 3000-word articles and that genre is especially guilty of such an accusation in my experience. Back in July a friend recommended Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity to me, and I decided to read it. I’ve heard a lot of praise for Newport over the years, and believe it or not I’ve never read any of his previous books despite their content being sort of related to mine. I’m glad I read it.
I will definitely be reflecting on Slow Productivity here in some way in future writing, but I loved the book and found some immediate application in my life that I think will help me both productively and creatively.
Now, let’s get into some fiction a bit.
I finally finished era two of the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. Brando Sando is one of my favorite living fiction writers, and maybe my favorite sci-fi fantasy author ever1, but my goodness Mistborn era two was rough. If it weren’t for the upcoming release of era three and the overall importance of the Mistborn series for all of the Sanderson Cosmere, I would have dropped Mistborn era two like a rock one book into the series. I just didn’t like this series much at all, and some of the decisions Sanderson made throughout the plot felt so…lazy? I hesitate to even say that because I have so much love for him. But man, it took me forever to read the series because I was just so bored so much of the time. I have gathered that not everyone agrees with me on this—shocker!—but many do agree that this series is the weakest of Sanderson’s Cosmere.
All of this is to say, book one of Mistborn era one (The Final Empire) is a great starting point for getting into Sanderson’s amazing universe if you’re interested. Susie had never really read sci-fi fantasy before Sanderson outside of Harry Potter, and she devours all Sanderson writes. So it’s accessible even if you’re not typically into that sort of thing!
After I finally finished out Mistborn era two I decided to pick up Project Hail Mary—it’s been on my to-be-read list for years. Man I loved that book. Most of my fiction reading is done on my Kindle while lying in bed before I go to sleep, just for 30-60 minutes any given night. Project Hail Mary kept me up later than I should have been multiple nights and broke outside the bounds of pre-bed fiction reading as well. Loved this book. If you want to read it, be sure to do so before the movie comes out in March!
I have a number of my books on my soon-to-be-read list, including The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor, Henry V by Dan Jones, and The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck. I’m not sure in what order, but those are some that are coming up next.
The plan is to be writing here with some regularity for the foreseeable future barring more taxing paid writing gigs that may eat into my ability to do that. Throughout much of this year I was posting here on Mondays, but the plan is to do that on Tuesdays from now on, I think. May not be weekly, as I try to work on some other writing projects, but often.
Thanks for reading all these updates! I’m looking forward to be writing some more here again.
-Chris
All due respect to Tolkien, but he could really tighten it up a bit in some places, imo.