My children go to a Homeschool Co-op group once a week, and Lydia was acting especially nervous about the first day. She was very quiet as we were talking about it and kind of stared at her shoes while she sat in the chair in our living room between her mother and me. Finally, she looked up and softly said, “Mom, could you maybe come sit with me in my class this week?” Her mother sensed the girl’s timidity and gently bent down to meet her daughter’s wandering gaze. “Probably, but… why? What worries you about class?” She shrugged unconvincingly. “Nothing really… Well,” she took a deep breath. “Alright. I just don’t like the get-to-know-you question thing at the beginning of class. I get…
A father's struggle to capture his children's brief moment of youth in words and pictures
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Andrea and I were having a conversation about books the other day and the subject came up about how frustrating it is when a writer suddenly introduces a very specific physical characteristic of the main character, right at the end of the story. We agreed that it was just not fair to ignore what the character looks like until well after the reader has already imagined their own idea of what they look like. For example, when the heroine of the story is standing on the hill with her new husband watching the sunset and it suddenly describes the wind blowing through her knee-length red hair that she never bothers to comb, the tangles of which are full of birds and families of small…
