I told myself this was the year.

In an incredibly difficult decision that I prayed and agonized over for weeks, I sadly stepped down from co-coaching Superhero 2’s beloved Odyssey of the Mind team this year, both to prioritize the precious family members I’d abandoned while supervising important things like the painting of cardboard and the constructing and reconstructing of robotics birds in my garage and also to return to writing. [And also to return my retired soldier his garage after five years of Odyssey and co-op shenanigans that essentially shrank the space he claims in our home to a double row of Sterilites on a web-covered metal shelf. The man spent 20 years of his life dodging bullets; he needed a hiatus from dodging bins of brushes and pieces of poorly-sawed off pipe all over his garage floor. 😉]

With Friday spontaneous practices and Sunday long-term practices and holiday construction days and a million and one in-between trips to Good Will and the Dollar Tree off my plate, I was confident I’d have plenty of time to both frolic in fields with the littles and simultaneously dust off this dormant adult brain to formulate real words again — like the kind that don’t include puns.

Writing will indeed return to the land! I vowed as I packed up little lunchboxes and washed bookbags monogrammed with previous brother initials that we just told the youngest would build character, and I dropped little boys off for the only day this year their hair will appear to be anything but mop-esque.

All four superheroes have now been in school for three weeks.

I reduced my volunteer commitments by approximately 1 billion.

With all this supposed extra time, I blocked off two days per week on my calendar to formulate real thoughts and write real words and pretend to be a fully functional writing professional, even if operating in a strongly caffeinated state.

And what in three blessed weeks have I written?

Exactly my name.

On 500 releases, permission slips and emergency medical forms.

And zero other things.