The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother's Day Giveaway!

If you were to leaf through my copy of Katrina Kenison’s The Gift of an Ordinary Day, you’d find it dog-eared, underlined and chock-full of exclamation points and asterisks. You’d even find a handful of passages inscribed with marginal notes like, “Yes!” and “This is me!” The Gift of an Ordinary Day is one of those books that simply brims with real-life wisdom, written in a voice that sings straight into your heart. Not only is it a poignant and compelling story, it’s also a book that will simply make you think.

Kenison leads the reader through her family’s tumultuous move from a Boston suburb to a ramshackle cottage in rural New Hampshire, yet this book is so much more than a memoir about moving and motherhood. It’s about embracing the ordinary, finding joy, learning to open oneself to adventure and overcome fear, listening to God, accepting grace and awakening to everyday beauty.

“I think the word ordinary has a bad rap,” writes Kenison, as she weathers the college admissions process with her eldest son. “And I can’t help but wonder, What is the cost of all this striving? And what gets lost in our relentless push to achieve, have and do more?”

Woven into her compelling story are these important and powerful questions, questions that made me think about what I’ve prioritized in my own life and how I am conveying those priorities to my own children. As I wrote in an earlier post about this book, Kenison has helped me think hard about how I have defined my children and what my role is in helping to shape them into adults.

I read this book slowly and thoughtfully, not wanting to rush or speed read (a rarity for me!), but instead drinking in Kenison’s graceful prose and profound revelations.

In short, I LOVED this book. And I want you to have the opportunity to love it, too!

Katrina (we’re not really on a first-name basis, but we have exchanged a couple of emails, so I can pretend, right?) has graciously offered two signed copies of The Gift of An Ordinary Day for me to give away as a special Mother’s Day gift to Graceful readers. 

To enter to win one of the two books, just simply leave a comment here. Entries close at midnight Thursday, May 12, with winners to be drawn at random and announced here on Friday, May 13 [and if you could be so kind to link to this post on Facebook and/or Twitter, too, I would be so grateful!].