Where does the time go???

For a while, I didn't post because I didn't know how to start again after Sept. 11. Everything I had to share seemed so trivial in comparison.

When Paloma started really walking, I didn't really get good pictures, and now she's all over the place.

I haven't been on the computer at home as much lately because Paloma's not nursing as much (and that seems to be my only excuse to sit down around here!).

Furthermore, my screen time has been consumed by myspace and facebook lately. I joined myspace in February when Jordan, my former student, died. I did more with it this past summer. I learned about facebook from my Aunt Beverly (she told me her kids used it when I was helping her set up her blog). I've found some cousins, old friends and former students, so I've been connecting, just not here. I was feeling like no one read the blog anyway, but I've heard from a few of you, so now I know otherwise.

So I apologize to anyone I disappointed!

I want to get back to blogging, at least for posterity, since I still haven't filled out a baby book for any of the kids--at least we'll have this someday.

All the time we're telling Carmen and Gabe things like, when you were this (Paloma's) age, you were such a carnivore... liked to stand up and play in the bathtub, etc.

I was such a freak; I didn't write in their baby books because #1, there was no free time, and #2, I was afraid to "mess them up". Arrrgghh! So dumb.

And I might as well mention, sometimes because I'm an English teacher, I feel like everything I write has to be worthy of my profession to be posted here. But the reality is, this is first-draft stuff. The polished piece I wrote this summer never even made it to the blog. I thought of trying to publish it, but it was never more than a thought.

Yesterday I attended a writing teachers' workshop in Dallas that was fantastic. I was hoping I'd write something to put here. The presenter, Gretchen Bernabei, had us writing, but I'm not a fast writer. My writing process requires percolation.

It's too bad, because I constantly see and hear things that make me want to write. Sometimes, though not as often as I'd like, I write when my students are writing. But that stuff never makes it out of my classroom.

Too bad, because sometimes we write about things like Walden, where Thoreau wrote about sucking the marrow out of life, planning to report whether he found it to be mean or, "if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it."

Life IS sublime, I am happy to report, and I go to sleep most nights with a prayer of thanks for the family that surrounds me and the life I'm blessed to lead.