When I was a little girl, my mother would often respond to my misbehaving by shaking her head and saying "I hope you grow up and have children just like you someday!"  My typical response involved laughing to myself that I would ever be old enough to have kids!

Well, now that my mother's words have come true, I really do have to smile...  A, our 3 1/2 year old daughter, is turning out to be the spitting image of me!  When we find something funny, we laugh in the same way - my husband gets such a kick out of it.  If it's pretty funny, we laugh with a whole hearted laugh, but if it's hysterical, we get this breathless, silent laugh thing going, and it NEVER fails to amuse Mister.  How else is she like me?  She'd rather "read" her books than do almost anything else...  she steals all my quirky phrases (okay, okay, I know that I'm the one she hears talking more than anyone else), and her interactions with E (our 3 1/2 month old daughter) are eerily similar to mine. 

It's a blessing and a joy to have a clone.  Ask  me again in ten years, though, and I might have a different answer!

Well for my second post of the blog, I wanted to tackle current events.

I think the gulf oil spill is a bad thing. Really.

Wow. That was intense.

Now to lighten the mood...

Today our neighbors must have wondered about us.  For the first half of the afternoon A was wandering around wearing a princess swimsuit and fuzzy winter boots.  Imagine that splendor.  Now add pink polka-dotted leggings to the mix and you have the look sported during the late afternoon hours.

Quite classy.

My junior year high school Enlgish class was the moment of one my biggest self-realizations about my writing.  I found that during certain writing assignments I would struggle to get my ideas across.  I would struggle with how I wanted to organize what I had to say and struggle with finding the right word.  During other assignments, I found that writing came very easy and I felt like I was "in the zone."   The words would flow forth and I would feel like Shakespeare reborn.  But as irony would have it, it was the assignments that I struggled with the most that I received the best grades, and the assignements that were writing "in the zone" were the ones that received the worst grades.

It was also during my junior year that we studied both Hemingway through A Farewell to Arms and Fitzgerald through The Great Gatsby.  I thought Gatsby was okay, but I loved A Farewell to Arms.  Not for Hemingway's themes or is life view, but for his writing style.  I loved his precision his "get to the pointness."  My English teacher told us that Hemingway would struggle for hours to write, standing at his typewriter, and would put down no more than 500 or 1000 words a day.  Writing was a labor or love for Hemingway.  Meanwhile, writing came quite easy to Fitzgerald.  My teacher said that it Hemingway was in some ways jealous of how easy it was for Fitzgerald to write.

To this day, I still labor with my writing.  I really try to be precise in my writing.  I thing my training and occupation as an engineer as really only worsened my condition.  And so the biggest problem with my writing is that I write too much like Hemingway.  Its a difficult problem to overcome.
What I really want, is to write my like Fitzgerald.

So one of my motivators with this blog is to practice my Fitzgerald writing.  And of course the best way to get better at anything is to do it.  Hence a blog.

Which is not to say that to get better at writing is my only motivation.  Like most things in life, I am motivated by numerous reasons.  I am motivated because I think it could be fun.  I am motivated because I think I have something worth saying - and worth hearing.  And I am motivated because I love Mama.  Because I love to read what she writes and I think my own writing will help motivate her to write more.  And because I think that strong marriages come in part of finding new ways to join your lives and interests together.

And so a blog is born.

A is very interested in fairies right now. Chesterton would be proud.