Comments are now closed and winners have been drawn at random!
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87 50
Timestamp: 2014-02-22 15:35:38 UTC
The winners were Whitney and Cindy. I have notified them by email!
***Edited to add: Some of you emailed and mentioned Antelope was out of stock on Amazon. It’s back in stock now. You can find it here. It’s also available at Barnes and Noble here. And you can always walk into your neighborhood LifeWay store or Barnes and Noble or what have you and find it there. Thank you!****
***Also edited to add: I’ll be back with a new post tomorrow, but I needed a day to get caught up on life***
I don’t want to be overly dramatic today.
(Because there’s a first time for everything.)
But there were a few moments last week when I was as close to being as broke down as Bob Costas’s eye.
I knew going into it that it was going to be a crazy week, mainly because I’m a terrible calendar manager and planned a whole lot of things in a short period of time. But I seriously overestimated my ability to deal with factors beyond my control. The truth is I like to believe I do not have control freak tendencies, but the reality is that I am absolutely not a control freak until things happen that I cannot control. And then I freak out.
So things got off to a rough start when Caroline started running fever on Sunday night and stayed home from school on Monday. I had a speaking engagement on Monday morning and I rushed off to that while P kept Caroline and then I came home and spent the next few hours with her at the doctor’s office.
Then Tuesday morning, Caroline felt well enough to go to school and I packed my bags and flew to Virginia Beach. All was good and fine until I realized I’d managed to make it to the East Coast just in time for a monstrous snow storm to hit. And so I spent the next two days completely stressing out about getting home and doing my best in-depth analysis of the U.S. weather maps as if that could make a difference.
But thanks to a lot of answered prayers, I managed to get home without a hitch by late Thursday afternoon. Which was perfect because I made it in time for Caroline’s basketball game that night and yet one more speaking thing I had scheduled for Friday morning and Caroline’s class Valentine’s party that was later that afternoon.
So you can imagine how it threw my day off when I received a call from the school nurse, right as I was walking out the door on Friday morning, informing me that Caroline was in her office with 103 degree fever.
Well. Great.
And can we also schedule some time for my impending nervous breakdown?
I rushed to pick her up from school as I called P to tell him I needed him to meet me at the house. And then I dropped Caroline off at home with him, drove to my speaking thing while making her an appointment with the pediatrician, and then attempted to give a talk on things I’ve learned about motherhood because IRONY.
You know what I’ve learned about motherhood? You can consider any day a victory if it doesn’t involve catching someone’s throw up in your hands.
I met Caroline and P at the pediatrician’s office where she tested negative for both strep and the flu and it was determined to just be a virus that needed to run its course. And so I paid our co-pay and got home right in time to do the live radio interview I was scheduled to do at noon. I have no idea if I even managed to form sentences by that point. So if you’re in the Detroit area and heard a woman who sounded like she was mumbling in the fetal position on the radio, I apologize.
Our original plan was to drive to Houston right after school on Friday, but we left around 2:00 instead. Caroline insisted she still wanted to go and I had a book signing scheduled for Saturday morning. So I loaded her up in the car and she fell into a feverish sleep that lasted most of the trip. Well, until we were about thirty minutes outside of Houston. At which point she woke up and asked if we could stop at a gas station and buy a bag of Funyuns.
This was one of those moments where I know for sure she’s my daughter. There is no sickness too strong for a junk food craving.
By Saturday morning she was a little bit better and even insisted on going with me to the book signing. Mimi and Bops came too and we were joined by family I hadn’t seen in a long time, old friends and some new friends that read the blog. I can’t even tell you how much it means that anyone takes time out of their day to come buy a book and say hi.
Finally, Saturday night we went to eat Italian food and I was able to take a deep breath because I survived it all and I’m sure the twitching in my right eye will go away at some point.
And I have to mention one more thing. While I was in the middle of all the craziness of last week, my publisher called me to let me know that The Antelope in the Living Room made the New York Times Bestseller list.
(It was #24 in the E-book category because apparently you all love your Kindles and Nooks.)
This is a really big deal at my house. As evidenced by the fact P asked what was for dinner last night and I reminded him I’d written a New York Times bestseller and he might have wondered out loud when my “New York Times Bestselling rear end was going to the grocery store”. And he might have not said “rear end”.
But seriously, I am so grateful. Thank you so much for buying this book and spreading the word and posting about it on all the social media. Making that list has not one thing to do with me and everything in the world to do with all of you who show up here to read what I write every day. I will never cease to be so appreciative.
And so as just a small thank you, I’m doing a little giveaway today. Two of you have the chance to win one of these scarves.
Along with a copy of the audio version of The Antelope in the Living Room.
All you have to do to enter is leave a comment on this post. I’ll keep comments open until this Friday, February 21 at noon and then choose two winners at random using Random.org.
And don’t forget that it’s also not too late to enter the Six Words contest. You can read all about it here.
Have a lovely President’s Day.