Back to School. . . and the end of an era, so to speak.

All three children started school this week.  That's right: three.  Honeybadger has descended upon the local church preschool and begun her educational reign of terror.  As usual, everybody loves it - loves their classmates and teachers and curriculum and the shine is still painfully bright on the school year. Meanwhile, I'm back in my own classroom - two sets of twenty students ready and willing to learn all of the glorious things I have to teach. 

It's the end of an era:  Honeybadger should be our last child - which means our last child has entered the preschool-to-high-school pipeline - thus allowing me small windows of freedom to do things I haven't had much time to do in oh, say, the past 10 years or so.

One of those things is writing, though I promised that last fall at this time.  In some ways I am writing more - I've begun a professional blogging gig. But my personal writing has suffered tremendously over the past 10 years.  I was reading an old friend's blog the other day - and she was talking about the trials and torments of being a writing mother and I was thinking of myself as a mother who used to write.  In many ways that is true and I'm not particularly impatient with it.  In some ways that writing part of me has been doing necessary things like keeping short people from licking the cat or eating paper.  And that's fine. 

But I'm surrounded by women who have managed to be mothers and still write and I'm very impressed with their ability to do so.  I want to be them. 

And so here I go - I'll start with reading a bit more.  Poetry. Fiction. What have you.  This month I started sort of easy with A J Jacobs's Drop Dead Healthy and Anthony Bourdain's The Bobby Gold Stories.  Next up will be some collection of poetry.  Or collections. Then a book of writing prompts - with a daily writing goal of one sort or another.  But also more reading.  I've spent a decade putting in little of substance - and my writing life is suffering for it!

Any suggestions?  What have you read lately?