Blog by Any Other Name

     It is SO hard to name things.  Not kids, you just meet them and they just feel like a Bill or a Ruth*, right?  Titles are what is really hard. To be original, to be edgy, then you think you are clever and Google yourself and find out that spelling and caps just the way you have it, there are 300 other people already using your title.  I have done this twice.
     I can stand around talking with my husband or friends and turn a phrase like Seinfeld.  Let me sit down and deliberately try to be clever, and I am lost.
      In this case, I just treated it like any other idea, and searched Thesaurus.com to see if there was any cleverer words to use.  There wasn't.
     
      Whenever we make a large scale decision, we think it is the right thing to do.  Small scale, the little decisions add up to your life.  In the end, all the decisions, big and small, lead to the place of "where God wants you to be."  In other words, do it the easy way, or do it the painful way...you won't disrupt His design.  I am not loving this.  We are on the path we have chosen, and we will end up where He wants us to go.  We'll be on the path longer and it will be bumpier.  We haven't missed on the big decisions.  The daily life decisions have been steeped in laziness, selfishness and immaturity.  Enough self recrimination.

     The economy has kicked us in the butt.  My husband still has his soul stealing job.  For which we are grateful, but the way they have kept the doors open is through salary reduction and "sabbatical". Without God's protection up to this point, we would (and may yet) be living with...
     Extended family...the price for participation has always been ours to pay.  If we don't call, no one does.  If we don't visit, no one does.  Except my mom.  Who takes me apart psychologically, like a good mechanic takes apart a transmission.
     We live in "The South".  Everyone has shoes and you can get a decent meal, but we are unreconstructed in terms of our thinking about skin color or special needs.  We don't have that good "master race" look. We just brought home a little boy from China in October.  He has a cleft lip and palate scar.  People stare.
     Really?
     Really.
We used to live somewhere else.  We are all still desperately homesick.

So.  I am choosing to believe.  Not that I will get my way, but that it is all a part of a bigger design. 

Any resemblence to the name of anyone else's book, band, or blog is purely coincidental.

*Bill & Ruth's was a sandwich shop in the town where I went to college.  I got all tangled up trying to find names that weren't referring to people I know.

First Time is a Charm

Uh, no.  That is not quite right.  There has to be a first post for every blog.  It is uncomfortable.  You have already written a little "About Me", and there is no context of previous conversations or on-going blog relationships to springboard into the conversation.

I became acquainted with blogging in 2009.  I became addicted, for a short time, to other people's blog lists.  In this way, I discovered a LOT of variety and found out what a 'niche' was(other than where Jesus' Mom sits in Grandma's church).

I got my own blog, sort of an adoption-y thing. I met a lot of great people, whom I admire greatly and hope to be like, someday.  In time, I found out that blogging was what I liked, and adoption blogging is like anything else women do together.  Eventually, the mean girls with all the cash have the best gear, and they only hang out with people who have the gear or better hair than they do.

What I really love is the conversation.  I love getting together with friends and making each other laugh.  Every day.  Not just on a girls' weekend where we all say, "We should do this more often."

My best friends, have told me to write.  Blogging has afforded that daily "pull" and "push".  It "does good like a medicine"*.

Why the new blog?  Fresh start? Maybe. Freedom to have a good time blogging on topics other than adoption? Maybe.  Expand my skills.  Maybe. Need someplace to be freer to be myself.  Stuff to say that adoption people are not looking for?  To be sure. Maybe I just feel led.

At any rate, I got through the first post.

*I kind of borrowed that from the Bible.  A joyful heart does good like a medicine. It is where I am going with this.