(1. Farm fresh eggs, every morning. 2. Solo cutie tea party. 3. My new tea love - tastes like weeding the garden in July. 4. Tulips - pretending spring is here already! 5. Alan's 30th birthday gift on friday - I made him a calendar with a different herb for each month.)

Pictures have been totally random and disconnected. I know. My vision and intentions for this space are always changing, always growing with me. I don't fully remember my thoughts when I initially decided to start this venture, but I do remember at some point during the first year feeling like the blog controlled me rather than the other way around, and at that point I gave myself permission to always let it be whatever I needed it to be at any given time. I come here to preserve memories, to keep myself creative and to share ideas, and to connect and find community. I've been doing this for some 2.5 years or so now! I hope this place has matured with me and continues to reflect me as I grow and settle into my own self. The last several days and weeks have found me doing a lot of verbal (and maybe embarassingly angsty) processing with Alan about my life, usually while I pace around the kitchen and do a decent amount of dramatic hand-gesturing. I jokingly call it a quarter-life crisis, it's really a stirring in my gut, a longing for. . .? I'm not sure? To understand where I fit, what I'm good at, what I want to accomplish? Maybe I'm just restless! Alan says this happens to me every February. I don't remember, but he might be right. Perhaps I just need some fresh air. Or perhaps every February it just gets so absolutely dead and quiet that I'm forced to process my life just a little bit more, in a two month chunk every year. Anyways, as I was waxing on about these things Alan gently reminded me that I'm a mother, and sometimes that is enough. It was a good reminder that I certainly needed. I am not a mother only, but neither am I "only" a mother. In the midst of finding myself thinking, I have no legacy! What will it be? I am reminded that my children are just that. I have other passions, other goals, and perhaps I will be remembered for other things as well, but I refuse to accept that voice that says that the work of being a mother is somehow "less than", or that children are not a worthy legacy. I'm not the first to say this, but since I still struggle with feeling it, perhaps it needed repeating.

So that is where my mind has been, in this deepest, darkest end of winter, and I am finding beauty in snapshots, which is being reflected here. I can hardly believe that in 4 months time this space will be bursting forth with verdant garden pictures, and surely my heart and mind will bend into summer and this space will be just what I need and will reflect that, too.