Musing: To Begin

My daughter woke up three times last night.  If she were eight months old, I could perhaps excuse the disturbances to my sleep.  She’s sixteen months old.  No excuses.  In my semi-sleep-deprived state, I have to chuckle at the irony of an email I received from Amazon.com yesterday.  “A shipment from your order” the anonymous sender so kindly informs me, “has been returned to our fulfillment center as undeliverable.”  In the package was a book titled Bedtiming: The Parent’s Guide to Getting Your Child to Sleep at Just the Right Age.  Apparently, my sleep deprived brain had typed in an old address to the shipment instructions.  Oh, Amazon.  How I needed that package to arrive at my house and not your fulfillment center yesterday.

All this is to say that I feel justified in blaming my poor daughter for my negligence in creating a blog.  What harried new mom has time for anything other than wondering whether she showered recently enough to run errands at Target?  Yet, as a recent episode of Ugly Betty reminded me, blogging is so 2006.  I’m about four years behind my early adopter husband who has gone so far as to set up a wordpress.com account for me in hopes that I will follow the light down this path of online literary revelation.  Lack of sleep and other excuses aside, the true motivation behind the inception of this blog is this: I’m shouldering an inordinate amount of writer’s guilt.  I blame my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Bower, for putting a few too many stickers on my stories.  I blame my mom for hoarding a treasured vault of my high school essays.  I blame my best friend Anna for making a writing career look like a breeze with her first-class tickets across the Atlantic to wax poetic about France.  I blame the 112 pairs of teenage eyes that stared trustingly at me from the desks in the classroom as I rhapsodized about the joys of strong verbs.  Yes, everyone.  I should be writing.  So why don’t I just go ahead and begin.

To put it simply, Belle Squeaks will be a forum of my thoughts and discoveries as I learn the new-parent ropes in Pittsburgh or wherever else life takes me. If you’re still reading, I’m ever so glad.  It either means that you’re not a fellow sleep-starved parent, or I’ve written something that sparks your interest.  If you continue checking in on my progress, expect to find roughly three new posts a week with a focus on Musings (my thoughts on, well, anything), Wanderings (activities that appeal to a mom and her toddler), and Treasures (products that have made my life easier or more enjoyable).  And now, as I tell my students, the first sentence is the hardest to write…