Here Goes Nothin'

What am I doing??  I just spent twenty minutes clicking on endless drop-down menus to try to customize this page.  And I still find it quite generic-looking, which has always been the thorn in my side:  generic things are just not good enough.  Ah, well.  This one's going to have to be.

Some in my life have asked why I've never done a blog.  This is my answer:  most blogs are kind of boring and very one-sided.  You post some stuff about your life, you get a couple of comments, the end.  Personally, I subscribe to exactly three blogs:  my sisters' blogs and A Holy Experience, by Ann Voskamp--because I love my sisters and want to know what's important enough to them that they would blog about it and because I never feel I have wasted my time thinking through life and faith with Ann Voskamp.

I doubt many people will even read this.  Surely you don't have enough time in your day?  Regardless, I now begin the blogging journey--for me, my husband, my children.  Not really for you.  See, I still believe most blogs are boring--this one probably will be, too.  But I am compelled for the sake of posterity--for the archival qualities that a blog provides and preserves for my family in a way that nothing else really does in this day and age.  I am an English major--a writer, a talker, a communicator, a lover of vocabulary and grammar, appreciative of wit and sentence structure....  It's part of who I am and bleeds into every facet of my life-bringing.  And I think to myself, "what if my mother never shared her love of a healthy lifestyle or children's literature...?"  Or "what if my dad only ever took us to McDonald's and not all his favorite little coffee shops and country restaurants where he taught us to pour over the crispness of nearly-burnt cornbread edges?"  These are things I know about my parents.  And I want my children to know some things about me.

My family and I leave on Saturday for a pretty special trip--Northern Ireland, Ireland, London.  Dean attended two and a half years of graduate school in Belfast early in our marriage, pre-kids, so the area is very dear to us and holds a gaggle of cozy, wet and emerald memories.  We haven't been back since Truman was three and a half and I was pregnant with Walker, circa 2004, so to be going as a family unit with all three kids and showing them all our special places and faces is going to be a real treat.  This whole blogging foray has kind of been brought on by this trip and wanting to have a record of it.  Depending on how it goes for the next two weeks, this will either go forward as a travel blog only or will morph into something more consistent.

My dad was famous for little sayings when we were growing up.  Many times, when we'd get in the car to go somewhere--be it a big road trip or just down the road to a friend's house--he'd look at us, all buckled in and ready, and announce the beginning of the journey like this:  "and away we go...."

Buckle up, friends.  This is happening.