These days.

School has started.  Three kids, three bookbags full of homework, three sets of shoes to find each morning before the bus is honking at our door. 

Football has started.  Two different teams.  Two different practices, two different games played in, of course, two different ends of the county.  Excpet for October 6th.  On that very special day, the stars will be aligned.  Both boys will be playing on the same field just a couple of hours apart.  Amazing.

Soccer has started.  Haley and Coach Tom will be wrangling a group of attention-lacking misfits at their very first game this week.  Enough said.  God bless 'em.  Go Orange Team.

My mom and Karin delivered a puppy from a breeder in Michigan for Service Dogs of Virginia.  Their time here started off with a "bang" (insert an ER visit 30 minutes after their arrival, thanks to Haley cracking her head open and bleeding like crazy after a fall off of a swing) and ended too soon...  They even extended their stay by a day and I was still trying to make them stay longer!  The time always goes by too fast.  Always.

But now?  These days?  Things are settling into a routine. We're busy, that's for sure. But there is a consistency to the schedule. And for some strange reason, it feels a bit less chaotic than the first couple of weeks of school.  So there's that.

But there's also this:

Sometimes a letter from a brother finds its way to you at precisely the right moment.
 

Friday of last week, a day after my mom and sister had headed back to Ohio, life got the best of me in the evening.  I walked down to the mailbox for a moment of quiet. Kids, dogs, homework, housework, dinner. Walking down to the street for the mail becomes an escape, if just for a minute. I was feeling kind of lonely and a little overwhelmed, so when I saw a letter from my big brother, I sat my butt down right there in the driveway and read it immediately. I laughed and cried and felt like I could hear his voice. Thanks, Keith.

Letters from brothers sometimes brighten your day right when you really need it.  So does this guy right here.  

He's maturing. Most everybody loves a cute puppy, but I find that Cade is becoming even more enjoyable every day in a grown-up dog kind of way. His training is fun and interesting. I really love this part of my life.

I don't have a great way to wrap this post.  Life keeps rolling on, you know?  So I'll just write what my boys do when they've run out of things to say on a school paper:

THE END.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry