This is how my garden grows...

Sometime in the summer of 2009, after I found out I was pregnant with my son, I bought I big, flower-covered journal to write to him in. I didn't know anything about him yet, even that he was a boy, but I had so much to say...so, so much I needed to say in written words to my baby - words about my pregnancy, how much I loved him, how I hoped his life to be...words about myself, my own hopes and dreams, my flaws and my shortcomings...words about our life, how it began and how it was changing. After he was born, I continued to write to him. At first, I wrote a lot.
But as things got busier and busier, that little journal just sat on the nightstand collecting dust. Now that he is almost seventeen months old and has another sibling on the way, I feel a renewed need to say things to my babies that they just can't understand right now. I feel a need to record these days for them...to show them how we grew.

As a blogger, my history is a little spotty. My first attempt in the blogging world, Conversation Time, was a lifesaver to me in the months after Chase's birth. Writing in that space about anything and everything gave me a renewed sense of self in a world that I was struggling to place myself in. As I tried to learn to recognize myself not only as me, but also as someone's mother, blogging was a way for me to reconnect with who I'd been...to find my voice during a season when my heart had grown so big that it drowned everything else out. But, like the baby journal, that blog has been sitting in some forgotten corner of the internet collecting dust for months now.

I have realized that what I need as a blogger (and a writer...and a person) is focus to follow through. I need purpose and less personal pressure to be perfect. Like the plants in my garden, and the babies in my home and belly, I need a place to grow. I need a place to plant seeds and watch what they grow into. I need a place to talk about who I am becoming as a mother and a person. I need a place to watch my family grow and change. So, friends, welcome to my garden!