the fleeting dog days of summer...

We've had a good summer. We've come a long way in a year. We've found our footing. We've found our style and I could say, to a certain degree, we've found ourselves. The first year of divorce is a huge learning curve for both parents and children. We all have to find our new normals and it takes a while, but I do believe that we may have gotten there. There seems to be a peace about us... a calm in our home that wasn't here last year. A sense of home in our little home, that we hadn't felt a year ago. A year has come and gone and now, it seems that summer has as well. School is just around the corner. It hardly seems possible. Usually I am eager to send them on their way. This year, not so much. We've had a perfectly balanced summer. Balance is important. Crucial. It is absolutely crucial. I've been able to better balance work and children. My daughter has been away all summer with friends and family - in Maine and most recently in Bridgehampton. Goodness she has it rough! The boys have been with me this summer. They too went to Maine for a week and we've put them in a wonderful day camp program for a few weeks which has allowed me to write during the daytime and spend my evenings with them. It's really been ideal. I'm hoping that I can keep this up next year, but as I get more and more assignments I won't be able to take time away from writing and certainly I've been writing less this summer than I do during the school year. But I am learning something in this process, and that is that everything really has a way of working out... sometimes you need simply to sit back a relax - something for me, as a panicker and a worrier, which is terribly hard to do.I'm working really hard at this, though.

So now, like the everyone else whose children will soon be climbing into those bright yellow buses, we're trying to cram in all that we can that we haven't done yet this summer. We have to fit these activities in with haircuts and back to school shopping and orientations and those little nagging things that get in the way ;) but our calendars are filled. We're making the most of what has turned out to be a glorious, beautiful season. I've been blessed... truly blessed.

Fall promises to be a busy season as well. It always is but this year I'm headed to London with 11 other hand-picked and talented designers and bloggers to promote some fabulous new products and businesses emerging on the other side of the pond. I am thrilled and honored to have been chosen... and so happy to go back to the UK and to my roots... and while I have no (known) family members living there anymore, it will be so wonderful to go back. But, meantime, before we focus on fall, I will not divert my attention from the precious few days we have left of summer!

XOXO,

Jessica