Howdy! I’m Kelly I. Hitchcock, and I’m thrilled to be joining the Austin Moms team. I grew up in a town of less than 2500 people in Southwest Missouri, and I now live in Southwest Austin with my husband, Mike, and our identical twin girls, Alexandra and Elise, who just turned 6. We’ve been in South Austin for 11 years, where we relocated during a summer of record-setting consecutive 100+ degree days after a winter in Kansas City where it snowed every weekend and melted every Monday.

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Growing up the oldest of 3 kids in a poor, mostly rural community in the Midwest with a single dad has greatly influenced my writing and the way I parent (usually as a shining example of what not to do). I’ve wanted to be writer ever since I could hold a pencil. My first book was a retelling and awful illustration of The Lady and the Tramp that I wrote on notebook paper and bound with bread bag twist ties; my mother probably still has it somewhere. Since then, I’ve written 3 books, the latest of which comes out June 21. I’ve had poems and short stories published in various literary magazines and anthologies, and I’m also a regular contributor to Moms Don’t Have Time to Write. You can visit all my work here!.

I’m a chronic over-committer: I have a full-time job. I have two girls in kindergarten. I have a book coming out. I’m writing a fourth book and cranking out poems, short stories, and essays to put out into the world after kid bedtime. I am the taxi driver to Lone Star Soccer Club games and Balance Dance Studio classes. And yet I still haven’t learned my lesson and raise my hand to volunteer for things – usually school things – far more often than I should, like a masochistic Oliver Twist… Please, sir. I’d like some more.

Kelly Hitchcock's familyAs you might imagine, my typical response to someone telling me I can’t do something is “hold my beer,” and motherhood is no exception. Growing up the way I did, I never thought I would want children of my own, but then my doctor told me it would probably never happen. They told us were good candidates for IVF, and they weren’t lying. One of my earliest “mom moments” was seeing a second heartbeat at our 6-week ultrasound after a single embryo transfer and dumbly asking the nurse “Um… what’s that?” When people ask if our twins were planned, we usually point to one of them and say, “that one was.”

Last year my husband and I made the decision to call our family of four complete and donate our remaining frozen embryos to couples who face the same kinds of fertility struggles we did, which has given us a whole ‘nother perspective on parenthood that I never thought I’d have. But if there’s one constant in life, it’s that it’s always throwing us curveballs!

Kelly’s independent bookstore sticker and bookmark collection

I love to visit independent bookstores and go camping, not glamping, in Texas’s parks – I collect stickers from both. I have a mile high TBR pile and a walk-in closet full of fabric and notions that I visit in my copious amount of spare time, when I’m not fighting the clock to get my word count done or answering strangers’ common twin questions. (Yes, they are twins. Yes, they are identical. Yes, they are mine. Yes, both of them. Are they natural? No, that one’s wearing a weave. Also, ew!) A rule-follower to a fault, I abide by my one piece of life advice for everyone: wherever you go, whatever you do, always bring baby wipes and a book.

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