First Paragraph, Tuesday Teaser -- I See London I See France

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the first paragraph of her current read. Anyone can join in. Go to Diane's website for the image and share the first paragraph of the current book you are reading.
I was wondering which book I should feature today for First Paragraph and Tuesday Teaser, when I realized, I'd better showcase my own.
I See London I See France by me (Paulita Kincer) is about a married mother of three who realizes she doesn't know who she is or what she wants any more. So she sells her minivan and, with her three children, runs away to Europe.
Here's the first paragraph:

“I’ve had enough, Caroline.” He tossed the words down the stairs like an empty laundry basket.
Obviously, that was a subtle signal my husband Scott needed some time alone. It’s not like I immediately followed him up the stairs to continue the fight I’d started with a few well-placed comments about the leak in the bathtub not fixing itself.

Instead of shadowing him to the second floor, I continued to the dining room table and calmly folded clothes. I could hear him moving around as the old wooden floors squeaked above me.  I pictured him pacing in anger as our angry words dissipated. He’d probably calm down by the time I finished folding the clothes in neat piles and stacked them back in the basket.

Also this week  is Teaser Tuesdays. Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Open to a random page of your current read  and share a teaser sentence from somewhere on that page. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your tease.

Here's my teaser from page 54 during a flashback to Caroline's college days in France:

 I suppose we were taking our lives in our hands, Jean-Marc sailing with me as his helper, since I didn’t know what I was doing. As he taught me to sail, pulling on the ropes with my hands, hooking my feet under a cord and leaning out over the water to balance the boat, I became bruised and callused on my palms and the tops of my feet.I didn’t feel the pain, though. I felt the exhilaration of skimming along the very blue water and the spray on my face. On a sailboat in the Mediterranean with a handsome Frenchman. Would any of my friends at home believe it?

Hope you enjoyed the teasers. Please spread the word. My novel is available on Amazon or Barnes & Noble  or in paperback.

Dreaming of France -- I See London I See France

Please join this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.
Finally, my latest novel I See London I See France is available.
It's a fun, women's fiction novel with the exhaustion of mothering and a hint of romance.
Here's the blurb:

When her husband of a dozen years walks out in a huff, Caroline Sommers walks out too – to Europe, with her kids after impulsively selling her minivan for travel money. Tired of being the perfect wife, she escapes to rediscover herself, and possibly rekindle the unrequited love of a Frenchman from her college days.  While shepherding her kids from London to Scotland then Paris to Provence, she finds herself at a crossroads. Does she choose love, or lust, in the arms of a European man, or should she try again with the father of her children and the man she truly loved, once?

I wrote this book originally when the kids were little. It was my first novel, but I put it away. I've revised it a few times and I'm really happy with its latest revision. I added flashbacks throughout as the main character remembers her college crush with an older Frenchman Jean-Marc. Part of Caroline's quest through Europe is to learn whether she settled for the wrong man by marrying her husband.
And where did those ideas and feelings for Frenchman come from? My very own trip to France when I was 22.
I've sworn my kids to secrecy -- because we are still connected to the family in France-- but I had a major crush on one of the brothers.

This snapshot doesn't do justice to my French crush, but imagine learning to sail in the Mediterranean with a handsome French doctor. The character in my book is a little more extreme, but has a lot of the same yummy qualities. 

Here's a link to the paperback version of I see London I See France.

The Amazon link for a Kindle version at $4.99 is here, and the Nook link is here.

I hope  my book helps other to Dream of France too.

Can't wait to see what you post this week.

Happy BIrthday

Twenty years ago, I lived in a warm climate and a spotless house. I was a size six with 18 pounds of basketball belly when I got up early in the morning, about this time, and drove to the hospital an hour away. Four hours later, Grace was born. Eight pounds, eight ounces.
And, obviously, my life has never been the same -- in a good way. Yes, we've had our mother daughter run-ins and temper tantrums (both of us). But when I went to the hospital, I could never have dreamed that I'd be giving birth to one of my best friends.
Sometimes I think that she relies on me too much, but then I realize that I rely on her too. She's always happy to talk about my day and offer advice on how raise her brothers. We laugh together a lot, and I don't think there's much more I could ask for from her. Someone who loves me, who makes me laugh and who I have watched become a beautiful, confident young woman. And that's only the first 20 years.
Happy Birthday, Grace

Chubby, Little Hands

At the Newman Center on OSU's campus where we go to church, we sit to the side in a section filled with families. Our kids aren't little and restless anymore, but it is a habit we got into and so we continue to sit in the family-friendly section. This morning, Earl and I both seemed to be noticing lots of adorable kids. He was fascinated by an Indian boy and then a baby who looked like a mafia member.
I watched our friends who sat on the steps with their son, who is Spencer's age, 16, and their little girl who is 6. The girl has thick, gorgeous dark hair. She was born with a full head of hair that she now pulls out of its ponytail holder and smooths down again before trapping it. I can tell this is a new skill that she takes great pleasure in. But what really got to me today was when she leaned over to whisper to her mom.
If I'm going to whisper to someone, I may cup my hands around their ear. This little girl, Elizabeth, reached her arm around her mother's neck, her little hand pressing her mother's head toward her mouth as she whispered her secrets. And I remember little hands pressing me closer.
When I nursed Tucker (until he was 3!) he would rub his finger against a mole on my cheek. Grace would twirl my hair while she nursed. My own children had those little chubby hands that were always reaching for me and caressing me.
This morning, Tucker sat next to me in Mass and I reached over and rubbed his broad back a few times. But I know there are limits to how long I can maintain touching this 14-year-old before he shrugs me off.
Still, there are days when Grace will lie down on the couch and rest her head on my lap. Sometimes if we are walking somewhere, she will grab my hand and we'll swing them along like we did when she was little. And both of my boys, although 6-foot, 3-inches and 6-feet tall, will push my office chair away from the desk where I am sitting and climb onto my lap for a quick hug and talk before they're off again to their teenage boy activities.
I remember feeling overwhelmed with the physical contact of little kids, especially while I was nursing. I didn't think I could stand for another person to touch me. Now, I realize how rare those days of constant touch are because they slipped away so quickly. So I take the hugs and hand holding where it comes these days.

Passions

Sometimes it's hard to keep all the balls in the air at the same time.
If I decide to focus on writing, my running slips. If I decide to really train for running, my writing falls off a cliff. I won't even tell you where mothering and teaching fit in.
One of the problems is that I am most productive early in the morning. At 5 or 6 a.m. I am usually either at the computer writing or on the road running. And that is my window of opportunity.
If I write for an hour or two, I'm not likely to then go for a run. I might head out the door, but I don't make it too far.
If I go for a nice run, when I return dripping sweat, I'm more likely to sit on the front porch and read the newspaper than I am to sit at the computer and write.
Many days these past few weeks, my early morning hours have been spent preparing for class or grading papers. I'm teaching four online classes this summer, but once everyone is out of bed, if Mom is home, the expectations are that I'm not really working. I can make lunches and run to Target, and all those other little errands that eat into my day instead of grading and preparing for the classes I do have to go to teach.
Grace and I have also been following an exercise program that takes an hour to an hour and a half everyday with only one day of rest each week. We've finished five weeks of it so far. Grace is not an early riser, although I may roust her out of bed at 8 on mornings when she has to work. So this is another thing that is eating up my time.
There's always the evening, someone might suggest. But they haven't seen me in the evenings. I'm wiped out. Whether I've been teaching, grading papers, running kids to doctors appointments or meeting friends for lunch, come 8 p.m., I'm useless and am lucky to hold a book in front of my face or lift up the remote to change the channel until I lurch to bed at 10.
I guess I'm kind of the opposite of ADD, people who can't pay attention to one thing. Instead, I end up focusing on one passion at a time and the others fall to the wayside.

Motherhood Changes Everything

I was working tonight in a tutoring session with a couple of other teachers. One of them is in her 20s, recently married. The other, a single man in his late 40s, was wondering how to handle a situation where a woman left his class repeatedly to take cell phone calls. She said she had to answer her phone because her son was epileptic and the school might try to reach her.
This could be a reason why she needed to check to see who was calling her, but the school probably hadn't called her twice during that hour. The male teacher wondered what he should do about it.
The earnest young teacher turned to me first and asked, "Do you have kids?"
I said yes and she said, "I will probably offend you then."
She turned to the other teacher and said, "I would tell that woman that having kids is her hobby and not my problem."
I was biting my lip to keep from laughing. I wonder if I ever felt that having kids was a "hobby."
This woman was so sure that she was right. Her students' personal problems, even if it was epileptic children, had nothing to do with her.
I remember talking to another teacher who now has two young children. She lamented that she had been so unfeeling toward her students who were single mothers who worked fulltime and took care of their children.
I told the young teacher, "Someday, you'll look back and cringe that you said having children was a hobby."
She didn't believe me.
That's okay.
Was I ever that naive about being a parent? Probably. The more vehement they are, the harder they'll fall when they have their own kids.
BTW, I don't allow my students to leave in the middle of class for cell phone calls either, but not because I don't respect their dedication to their children.
It's disrupting to the class.
"If you have to take a call, just take your things with you and go," I tell them so you don't interrupt the class again by coming back in.

Free Time? What's That

So many things I'm missing right now, like time to write blog posts, time to run with my friends.
It's 6:15 on Saturday morning. The trail is dark and snowy. So, of course, two of my crazy friends are meeting there, their breath rising in dark clouds as they run along. Their feet slipping in places where the snow has frozen unevenly. Wish I could be there and laugh with them.
I have to get Grace up in a few minutes to be at the sectionals swim meet at 7 a.m. Tomorrow we are going to a college for a scholarship competition. I'll miss dance class with my husband.
Everyone always told me how busy senior year is for the students. They never told me how busy it would be for me, the parent.
Then again, I have to consider that this is Grace's last sectional high school meet. I should enjoy these moments instead of complaining about how little time I have.
I'd better get a few papers graded before we go.
What are you doing this weekend? Things you want to do or things you have to do?