For years, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time keeping all the balls in the air.
If I’m honest, there are a few of my own that haven’t just been dropped—they’ve rolled away entirely. Tucked under the couch. Hidden behind a bookshelf. Sitting somewhere in the margins of family life where I’ve known they existed but never quite had the time to go looking for them.
Summer has always been my favorite season.
Not because it’s relaxing (it isn’t), but because it has a rhythm all its own.
School ends.
Tutoring slows.
A short literacy camp wraps up.
The lake calls.
The playlists get longer.
The kids pile into the car and we make our way to favorite places we’ve visited so many times they feel like extensions of home.
For years, the transition into summer felt almost automatic. A well-worn path our family could walk without much thought.
This year feels different.
A glance at my calendar landed on my son’s sixth-grade graduation—the last of four kids to leave elementary school behind—and suddenly I realized an entire season of our family life was quietly drawing to a close.
The tow-along years.
The little-kid routines.
The days when everyone more or less wanted to be where everyone else was.
It’s a good thing. A wonderful thing.
But it’s still a change.
At nearly the same time, I learned that the literacy position I’ve loved—the highly specialized role that has allowed me to spend my days helping children learn to read—was being cut and reimagined without me. On graduation day, I’d not only be celebrating my youngest child’s move to middle school, I’d also be stepping out of a job I wasn’t planning to leave.
Change has a funny way of arriving all at once.
And sometimes it changes what you notice.
So what now?
Maybe now I start looking for the things that rolled into the margins years ago.
The ideas.
The projects.
The interests that kept getting bumped to someday.
Not because my kids need me any less. Trust me, a twelve-year-old and thirteen-year-old can still keep life wonderfully chaotic.
But because this season seems to be inviting me to pay attention to a few things I set aside while raising four kids across ten years.
That’s really why North Margin Studio exists.
Not because I have everything figured out.
Quite the opposite.
It’s a place to gather the things we’ve learned along the way—the routines, traditions, systems, trips, transitions, college move-ins, hockey weekends, reading struggles, camp checklists, and family rhythms that have carried us through twenty-three years of parenting.
Not hacks.
Not perfection.
Just field notes.
Gathered and tested.
And maybe, as I figure out what’s next, they’ll help someone else navigate the season they’re standing in too.
Thanks for reading. I’m glad you’re here
More field notes soon.
💚
North Margin Studio 