Follow Friday: Me! Me! Me!

For this week's Follow Friday, I am going to stoop to the shameless plug. I've been floating around the Internets making mischief in one way or another and I figured it was about time to tell on myself.

Firstly, I just got a writing gig on a new satirical news website called Insert Eyeroll. There are some really funny writers on this site and I feel honored to be a part of the crew. Check out my first piece: some important advice for new parents. I finally have an outlet for my slightly subversive side.

On a different note, my husband has nominated me for an Eagle Rare Life award and I need your help. Online voting takes place until January 2012. You can vote once a day and the top 7 vote recipients receive donations to their favorite charity. The overall winner gets to donate $20,000 and the 6 runners-up get $2000 apiece. I'm currently in the top 5 so with your help I can stay that way. Please bookmark this link and use the magic of social media to spread the word so I can help my favorite worthy cause: CJ's Thumbs Up Foundation.

Of course, just in case you get any crazy ideas about googling me to see what ELSE I've been doing on the Internet, make sure you don't get me confused with this Rachel Reynolds. I know, the resemblance is uncanny. People ask for my autograph all the time. It's like we're twins or something.

Happy Friday, everyone. Go google yourself. But make sure you follow ME!

The Edge of Seventeen

It's that time of year when the blog musings center on my grief journey. Every year, it seems like we are busy with end-of-the-year school activities and the start of summer, planning vacations, and then (kablam)...it's almost July 9. Grief is funny. Grief is weird. I remember very early after Charlotte died, I watched the movie Rabbit Hole. There's an amazingly poignant scene where Nicole Kidman's character is talking with another woman who lost a child over 10 years before (played by Dianne Wiest). She talks about grief being like a brick in your pocket. It never goes away. Sometimes you can even forget it's there. But it comes back and makes its presence known from time to time. And (she says) "it's what you have of them." I probably did not fully realize then what a powerful and true analogy that is. As time goes on, our grief changes. Yet, it is always there on the edge of things. It sits in that pocket and sometimes makes itself known. This...

Bittersweet Sixteen

I think about Charlotte every single day. However, this time of year, I'm flooded with all kinds of memories as we commemorate the anniversary of her birth. This year feels like a bit of a milestone. Sixteen. If cancer had not taken her life back in 2010, I have a feeling I would be planning a massive birthday celebration this year. 16 always feels like a landmark year in someone's life. I have been thinking a great deal about the last birthday party we had for Charlotte in 2009. We didn't know it at the time, but we were halfway through her treatment journey. We had been through three major brain surgeries and a few rounds of inpatient chemotherapy. Treatments were not going well. In fact, right after her birthday, we would make the trip to Houston, Texas where we would settle in for about 10 weeks of proton beam radiation treatments and a new customized chemotherapy protocol. This was the unspoken "last chance option" to beat that aggressive brain tumor into ...

To everything there is a season

It's been a while since I used the blog to share my thoughts. What started as some random musings turned into much more than a Facebook post. I started writing this over a week ago but it's taken a minute to actually hit the publish button. Thanks for your patience. Welcome back. It has been a week (or two) . One of those weeks where everything happens all at once. A week where things need to happen in a particular order or everything‘s going to go to shit. A week where you just seem to go from one thing to the next thing and you’ll figure out what’s going to happen next as it goes along. A week full of work and family and rest and sleeplessness and it never feels like there’s enough time for anything. But somehow it all works out. A plaque on the library walk in NYC My week started with a trip for work to NYC. It coincided with my birthday. Because of that, I had all kinds of feelings all week about life in general. The week ended with a trip to Florida that, unfortun...

I See What You Meme

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