Well, here I go! Welcome to the first of my blog posts. The tag line “Musings from the Meadow” under the header of Journaling Out Loud comes in part just because it has that comfy, cozy alliteration feel. Just like when I came up with Candid Kids for my children’s portion of my photo business. Musings from the Meadow was the other title under consideration for this blog page, but because I also wanted to use this as a place to post travelogues for the family while on the road, it seemed smarter to be broader in my choice of title. Journaling has always been a go to for me in times of trouble or adventure so I figure if I’m going to do it online, then I might as well call it ‘out loud’!

As I touch on in my “About” page, I used to spend a good deal of time in nature as a child, thinking…wondering…pondering…musing…and listening. While I wasn’t always in a meadow, I was pretty much always laying on my back with my feet bare, looking up into a canopy of tree branches…maples, birches and white pines, or beyond the clouds and into the depths of the sky and posing my questions to myself or rather to the universe and not realizing at the time that I was getting answers whenever my “gut instinct” appeared to be kicking in. I just knew I always felt better about whatever was going after I’d done so.

Last night, or should I say, this morning, I received a text from my daughter at 4:09 a.m. letting me know that she’d safely arrived in France on the second leg of a three plane trip to Florence, Italy. We are a family of writers and I am the least of the three of us. Part of my husband’s job is to write. He writes editorials on the world of ski competition and its’ politics and has such keen observation on the sport that he has the world either applauding his thoughts or getting angry at his observations, but either way he is well read and much appreciated by the global ski audience. My daughter has just graduated from high school having received the school’s writing prize and an award for her Senior Thesis (okay, so she was also inducted into the National Honor Society…gotta brag a touch). Point being, she’s a very good writer. Better than the two of us. So it seems a little weird that I should start a blog, but I often feel that I have thoughts to share. I did well in high school English classes (a looooong time ago) and as an adult, I have taken a course in writing children’s literature so hopefully I can maintain some form of standard (even if I use too many commas and exclamation points)! I tend to realize at about 3 or 4 in the morning…as I did this morning… that I often have things to say, though I don’t have an outlet. Then I rarely go back to sleep. I do some of my most “amazing” (that’s a joke, son) composing in the middle of the night and then am exhausted the next morning and don’t remember what “brilliant” things I had to say! I’m hoping that maybe if I spend a little time getting back to my “Meadow Musings” and get it down before bedtime, then maybe I’ll sleep well!

I’m not really anticipating readership on this, expect perhaps family, but I’m doing this for me. With my daughter headed to college in the fall, I’m looking forward to doing something hopefully exciting and fun! No pearls of wisdom today, but thought I’d get this intro out of the way. Wish me luck…or wish me fun!