Several months ago, I blogged about my sister Mary and I writing a book for mothers of children from birth to age five. Though it took more than a decade to finish our project, God graciously allowed us the time we needed—despite Mary’s terminal cancer. 

Our planning and writing was a stop-start process that included endless interruptions but also the happiness of working together in the year before she went to heaven. And now, at last, the end-product is about to launch. It’s titled Thrive and Survive, Zero to Five, with subtitle, “2 sisters, 14 children and what we wish we’d known from the beginning.”

Mary was the one who brought structure to our ideas by outlining the book and creating the Table of Contents. She also wrote 58 sidebars that are sprinkled throughout—bullet-point extras not covered in the text.

The next series of blog posts on this site will offer sneak peeks into the content of Thrive and Survive, keyed to Mary’s sidebars. Then, come the end of August, the book should be available through Amazon and other sources.

Arriving at this point is deeply satisfying—and I hope Mary knows all about it. Her wisdom is laced through the book, and both of us share mothering  fails as well as successes. Our hope has always been that new moms won’t have to make the mistakes we did, and our prayer is that they will truly thrive in their efforts to do the most important job on the planet.  

“May she who gave you birth be happy.” (Proverbs 23:25 NLT)