Let's Start from the Very Beginning...

I have been wanting to write a blog for a long time now and reading some of my friends' great blogs have truly inspired me.  Also a very special book called Lift  by Kelly Corrigan reminded me that I should record all of this for my girls so they will know their childhood. 

Corrigan writes to her two girls "I heard once that the average person barely knows ten stories from childhood and those are based more on photographs and retellings than memory.  So even with all the videos we take, the two boxes of snapshots under my desk, and the 1276 photos in folders on the computer, you'll be lucky to end up with a dozen stories.  You won't remember how it started with us, the things that I know about you that you don't even know about yourselves.  We won't come back here.  You'll remember middle school and high school, but you'll have changed by then.  You changing will make me change. That means you won't ever know me as I am right now- the mother I am tonight and tomorrow, the mother I've been for the last eight years, every bath and book and birthday party gone.  It won't hit you that you're missing this chapter of our story until you see me (your mother) push your child on a swing or untangle his jump rope or wave a bee away from his head and think -Is that what she was like with me?"

When I read this book a year ago, this struck a cord inside of me, and I have gone back to it a lot as it sits on my bedside table every day.  I think it particularly hits home because I think of my mom and how she died before Joanna and Libby came along and how I don't know exactly what she was like when I was a little girl.....I have the pictures and lots of great memories but I don't know the day to day.  It is time to start what I have been putting off for way too long! Here goes...


Dear Joanna and Libby, this is for you- a record of your childhood.  Joanna, you are 4 1/2 now and Libby, you are 2, so Mommy has a little bit of catching up to do, but I will get it all here eventually!  I hope that it will be a glimpse at what every precious day is like with you and what a blessing you are to Daddy and me. You make our life complete and we couldn't love you anymore.  I thank God every day that He entrusted you to Daddy and me.....the best things that have ever happened to us!  Here's to holding onto every memory!