Now that I’m finished running around for the summer and all settled into Big Momma’s House, I’d like to start blogging again.  But before I sit down at the keyboard I always wonder for a moment if I should even bother.  There are, after all, so many more productive things I could be doing with this time.  Just think of all the scrapbooking/organizing/canning/decorating I could be doing in the hours that I blog.  (I mean, if scrapbooking/organizing/canning/decorating were things that I actually did.)  I know blogging is about as fruitful as talking to yourself in the middle of an empty parking lot, but every time I convince myself that I’ll drop it forever and do something that produces an actual result, I find myself eventually wandering back.  Why?  I can think of only one good reason that is insultingly obvious but which I will now try to cloak as profound (a skill necessary in any wannabe writer, btw.)

Writing about things I experience–especially random, everyday things–makes me feel like I’ve experienced those things more fully.   Like a trip to the grocery store or the best apple ever from the Farmer’s Market or how Ethan now prefaces everything with “apparently” or how sad I am that my children are getting older or how happy I am that my children are getting older or how sunburned my face got after picking up trash for two hours this morning along the Columbia River.  When I’ve finished writing about something, even the smallest something, I feel an exhilaration that rivals a Post-Workout High.  (Depending on the workout.)  (And how recently you’ve had a baby.)  What I’m trying to say is that when I write about something, I get to enjoy it all over again.  I like that.  I need that.  I need to feel like I can exert the tiniest bit of counter-pressure on the tidal wave of time that is sweeping, so mightily, right on over me.

Time, in all its scarcity, beat me to such a pulp this summer that I failed to write about many random, everyday, absolutely glorious events:  Megan turning nine.  A trip to the coast with family.  A trip to the mountains with friends.  How much I love my good friends.  Rachael starting middle school. Megan starting a new elementary school.  Ethan starting kindergarten.  Getting ready for another half-marathon.  Getting ready for an unexpected vacation.  How much I love unexpected vacations.  My husband’s crazy schedule.  How much I love my crazy husband.  The drama of trying to build a new house.  The drama of living at my parents’ house.  How much I love my parents.   How much I love drama.   How much I love to write.

So I hope you’ll indulge me as I canvass these experiences, a little post-dated, with the hope of enjoying them a second time around.  Life’s too interesting to let spin by in a blur, isn’t it?  So I try to hold down just a bit of it in the recapturing.  And if doing so sends me talking to myself in an empty parking lot, that’s okay.  I’m good with the parking lot.  (As long as it’s well-lit.)

Thanks for hanging out there with me.