Under Construction

Do you miss me?

I miss blogging.

I miss having time to write on this blog.

It's just not in the cards right now. As I mentioned last week, life has been busy. The good news is that it's all good stuff. I'm so excited about the CJSTUF Art Auction tonight. I've also been busy being satirical at Insert Eyeroll and imparting my knowledge on a variety of topics at Richmond Mom. My recent article about pediatric cancer received an interesting response from a representative of the Children's Cancer Research Fund. You should check out her comments and my response. Add your own two cents while you're there.

I'm distracting myself in my own blog. Back on topic.

So what else is distracting me from blogging?

I'm continuing to work on the book. I went through another major edit over the weekend. Back to the publisher for more ideas, tweaks, and suggestions. We have some important news to share, though, and I'm sharing it first with you, my devoted readers. We have a title and a cover!

Want to see it? There it is! That's my book! That's the cover of my book. Can you tell I'm just a little bit excited? The cover photo is one of my favorites, taken by my good friend, Jamie.

In addition to the book, I'm working on designing my personal website. Soon (hopefully soon), this blog will be ported to the new site and I'll have all kinds of fun ways to interact with my readers and continue my writing.

Of course, I can't be a REAL writer without a head shot. My shutterbug husband snapped a few photos of me the other day. Which one makes me look like a real writer? Most of my Facebook friends seem to think it's the black and white pic that's the winner. I like them both.

So while you may not finding me writing here with great frequency, there is still a lot of progress being made. I think the blog might take a back seat. I know it's temporary. Stay tuned!

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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