If I were an animal, I might be a sloth.

Yesterday I bought a book and spent 5 of my awake hours reading it in its entirety. Today I stared at the mound of citrus sitting on our kitchen counter for an unspeakable amount of time, allowing the sight to bring me tremendous pleasure in knowing that we can feed our kids nutritious food on a very tight budget. I laid in bed reading the news from 2p-3p, got up and made delicious boba smoothies for me and the kids, hooked up my new and utterly amazing birthday hammock in the backyard, then fell asleep in it for half an hour. We read and played on the floor at the public library for 2 hours. The world (and by world I mean my extremely limited exposure to it, so basically America) seems to toil endlessly to get ahead. Apparently, I am becoming polarized and fighting the trend. I’m even happily accepting my “extra” weight, calling my post children body a soft place to rest a weary head. Tis the season to delve into childhood and embrace it wholly… room temperature coffee and all. At what other time in my life will I be able to so freely behave like a child discovering her world for the first time and get away with it? Grandmahood? I sure as heck hope so.

There’s so much I’d like to write about and so little time to form my thoughts into written words. Throughout my day I think of sentences or beautiful ideas to journal about, but by the time I get to a pen and paper or the computer, I blank.

Bella will start a formal writing course next year and I am psyched to be learning alongside her. In my opinion, it is what my education lacked most. Everyone, no matter what profession you choose, needs to be able to represent themselves through spoken and written words. Written words need formal teaching; there’s no faking your way to well written. I wish I could. I am super self-conscious about misspelled words and run-on sentences and missed punctuation and all sorts of other writing things.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said these words to my kids: “Don’t say you’re not good at something. You get good at things with practice.”

So, I’m going to practice writing.

Like, intensively. Maybe. If I can stick with it.

If you’re lucky (or unlucky), you will get to hear my thoughts via the blog. But sometimes I will write in my journal or on scrap paper or on the white board. Sometimes I will speak my words and visualize them. I don’t really have any short term vision with this whole process (or with much of anything really, I’m more of a big picture thinker), but in 10 years or so I’d like to sit down and let words flow out of me like water from a faucet. Do you know why I don’t blog often? It takes me FOR.EV.ER. to write even the shortest of blogs. And, I think about my audience constantly and how it might fall on their ears (er, eyes), which is ridiculously hard to do when you’ve got an audience greater than 1 and you’re not even sure who is reading your blog to begin with.

Anyway. I need a memoir of the good and the gritty of raising up a family, so I think the blog is a great place to practice writing.  

Since I’m still wide awake (nap in hammock, member?) I think I’ll go and organize some bookshelves like a total geek. Don’t judge.