I'm Speechless!

How is THAT for the title of my first entry of my first blog?

But if you know me (and I presume you do or you wouldn't be reading this) you would know that I am almost never speechless. So, on the first day of Summer of 2007, I am giving you a little glimpse into my life. To be expanded.

I live in a ranch house in a shore town in New Jersey, which I share with a husband and three boys, who are 11, 9 and 7 - and for many, many years I was truly that ONLY girl in the house. So this year on my birthday when I finally was able to convince my husband that, after having all these boys, a cat would be a cinch, it HAD TO be a girl!!! And she is - her name is Chloe and she never leaves the toilet seat up, ever! But if someone else does, she drinks out of it. A great reason for boys to finally close that lid! Shortly after adopting Chloe there was a massive fishkill in our tank. It was UGLY. So, 9 suggested we go a different direction, something he often does. 9 wanted a mouse to replace the dead fish. I explained to him that a cat and a mouse in the same house is setting someone up to die, so we compromised and got ourselves a gerbil, equally likely to die but maybe less tempting? In keeping with my need to up the estrogen level in our home, I requested that our gerbil be a GIRL. The extremely clueless clerk (or maybe I was the clueless one?) couldn't tell if it was a girl or boy, so we took it home and decided that it must have a gender neutral name. So that is how "Zen" came into our lives. "Karma" sounded too girly (and Earl-y).

To this day, we have no idea whether Zen is a boy or girl, but she is always referred to as "she". It's only fair!

So, why am I blogging? Because I need somewhere to relax. 11 has coined a term about me: "Here comes mom in her race against time". Bustle, bustle, bustle. Is that what I want to be remembered for? Because someday, time will run out. Will I have won? And if so, who made up the rules? Guess what? I am making up the rules and this is it for me - my one and only life. And so I will blog about the adventures I have with my family and other parts of my life and they will either interest you or bore you to tears, but at least I will have paused and recorded these memories. And in recording them, I will have had the chance to reflect on them and consider ways to make more positive memories to enrich our lives.

So, this first foray into blogging is semi-complete, without the stories that I intended to tell about the tree and its pulley system and the fishing and the bike ride and the gardening/weeding/watering and "nature stew" 7 made me or the "7 sandwich" between pillows that 9 tried to eat or the seven things we had planned to do today that are falling by the wayside as I try to catch up with work on a day I am not getting paid for because $750,000 lies in the balance.

I bid you peace on a truly beautiful day at the Jersey shore!

ThatGirl

PS) I am going to have to figure out a way to put up pictures because my mother has given me noise for being her only child (out of five) who doesn't send pictures to her of my three of her sixteen grandkids. She and my dad left for home (Sin City, NV) yesterday sans pix of the boys and hopefully made it home okay!