I interrupt regularly scheduled vacation blogging to bring you this critical news flash.

Some of my regular blog readers know that I have had plans for quite some time (first documented here) to self publish my blog writings in the form of a book, for my children to read and share with their own children someday. Well, I am ecstatic to announce that the book is a reality and is officially available on Amazon! Click here, or on the book cover image below, to see for yourself.

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Thanks so much to all of you who read my blog, whether regularly or just occasionally. Though I don’t blog as often as I did when I started, your continued kind comments and positive feedback have encouraged me to keep going. My children will thank you some day for giving me the support I needed to keep writing for them. And keep going I will. This is only Volume 1 of what I hope will eventually be many.

And by the way, this is in no way a sales pitch. Especially since my regular visitors have read most of it already. It’s just an expression of my ecstatic joy at seeing my name on Amazon. It was a pipe dream. I never really thought it would happen.

Yes, I am still alive.

No, I don’t have as much time to write these days as I might wish. What precious little writing time I do have is mostly spent working on my book.

No, the book is not coming along as quickly as I would like. Finding the time has been a significant challenge. However, I’m encouraged by the response to what I’ve presented so far to the Christian writer’s critique group I have joined. The chapter that was critiqued yesterday made the group member who was reading it aloud cry, and I hope not because it was so shockingly bad. It touched her at exactly the point I hoped would have an emotional impact, so I am satisfied that I am on the right track.

Yes, I plan to continue blogging. To the two readers I have left, please do not give up on me!

Without further ado, I present Mo’s life, 2008 style.

• Sunday mornings: As of this week, teaching Sunday School for 3rd-5th graders. But only every other month, since I’ll be alternating with another teacher.
• Sunday nights: Weekly Bible study with my sister-in-law. A top priority.
• Monday nights: A script writing class at a local community college, in preparation for an upcoming project I will be working on with a friend.
• Tuesday nights: Kent’s weekly city council meetings, and my turn to hold down the fort at home with the kids.
• Wednesday nights: Church. A new series titled “Raising Respectful Kids in a Disrespectful World” starts next week. I’m eagerly looking forward to it.
• Thursday nights: Literacy tutoring.

In the rest of my free time (i.e., late nights and weekends), I somehow have to squeeze in the following:

• A freelance editing/desktop publishing project that I’m currently working on.
• Preparing for the weekly Bible study.
• Preparing for the Sunday School class lessons.
• Preparing assignments for my literacy student.
• Alumni interviews for my alma mater university.
• Homework for the script writing class.
• Research for the related project with a friend.

Other extracurricular activities that haven’t started yet, but will soon, include:

• Creating a reunion booklet for my high school class’s 20 year reunion.
• Assisting with the development a new Sunday School curriculum, since curriculum development happens to be my specialty. Of course my focus is job training for adults, not Sunday School for kids, but many of the underlying instructional principles are the same.
• A return to weekly soccer practice and games for Noah.
• Preparation for a conference presentation I’ll be giving in March. Which is technically work related, except I’m not finding much time to get to it at work.
• And the best one of all, the feather in my cap—I’ve been invited to participate in an author signing at a conference in April. It will be the official launch for the e-learning best practices book that my article is included in. Yay for me (and the other contributing authors, of course)!

So I’m a little on the busy side for much blogging these days, but it’s all good. These are all commitments I’ve taken on voluntarily and want to do.

Someday, I’ll probably look back on this entry and be impressed with myself in the extreme at how many balls I managed to keep in the air at one time. Either that, or my family will read back on it and understand why I self destructed. Only time will tell…

Since its inception on June 4, 2005, this blog has seen:

• 208 posts
• 66,018 words
• 1,397 comments
• 8,692 visitors

Top 3 posts with the most comments:

• The mighty mighty em dash (22 comments—including genuflection before my grammatical excellence and the offer of a pocket protector for Christmas)
• Able to leap War and Peace in a single bound (21 comments—including kudos for being a brilliant reading and writing superhero and a request for pictures of me in a spandex costume)
• Don’t try this at home (19 comments—including admiration for my husband’s wisdom, a vote for best post read over the Thanksgiving holiday, and a request to borrow my mother and her graph paper)

Longest post:

• My legacy to you (1351 words—apparently the correct number of words to hit people right in the tear ducts, as this is also the post in which I was accused of making people cry)

Post with the most visits:

• Ducky rules the world (148 hits—thanks to a link from Miss Cellania as part of her ode to ducks)

Category I publish to most often:

• Family (44 posts)

Search terms (including variations) that yield the most visitors to this blog:

• inspirational reflections
• locks of love
• sleep assault monique
• you reap what you sow meaning
• how I met my husband

And you can always check out all my personal favorite posts right here.

• a full day of travel to get home
• a packed weekend of brunches, dance recitals, bible study, and a secret undisclosed mission
• a hooky day to visit with out-of-town friends at Disney
• two days in the office to pack in two weeks’ worth of work
• a long weekend visiting Kent’s family in Tennessee in celebration of a niece’s graduation

I’m not done with this blog by a long shot. It’s just a 15-minute break. I’ll be back. Soon. Very soon. I promise.

In the meantime, please bear with me as I learn WordPress. I’ve found a basic design that I can live with, but I’ll be doing a lot of tweaking to customize it to my own personal specifications. If you find anything broken as a result of my growing pains, please let me know!

I’m headed home, for a few days, at least. That’s a good thing. I’ve been gone for nearly a week. It hasn’t all been for work — I’ve had some time to play too, but I miss my family. And I’m off again to Minneapolis on Monday. I’ll blog about my travels soon. Til then, wish me a speedy recovery from the jet lag.

What prompted this overdue return to the blogosphere, which I never meant to vacate in the first place? An invitation. Yesterday, I received an invitation to participate in a study that the psychology department at some small college in Iowa (anyone ever hear of Wartburg College?) is conducting about the opinions of women blog authors regarding online vs. "real life" friendships. The timing is a little ironic, given how inactive this blog has been recently, but it has motivated me to get back to it.

Regarding the study itself, I have no idea how they found me, though I’m flattered. Yet normally I’d have deleted such an email. However, they used the magic word. You see, if the study had merely been about "female bloggers," I’d have opined to let the lonely cyberspace adolescents on MySpace and its ilk have their say, and leave me out of it. But like I said, the study administrator used the magic word. She called me an author. Leave it to those psychology types to know how to inflate an ego! In my case, at least, it worked.

So has anyone else out there received this invitation? I’ve been encouraged to share the details with others, so if you are a female blog author between the ages of 22 and 45 (their rules, not mine) and are interested in participating, leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail (from the "Email me" link in the right sidebar of this page) with your e-mail address, and I will forward the invitation with the details.

Personally, I’m going to participate. I was a psychology major myself, and I know what a struggle  it can be to recruit research participants. I’m more than willing to help in their study.