{Originally posted on Slouching Past 40.}

Carol was prissy.

Years of living alone had cemented the fact. Without Charlie around to raise his eyebrows, a bit mockingly but largely affectionately, she’d begun to give in to some of her more obsessive tendencies — like taking Charlie’s shirts to the dry cleaners every so often so that they wouldn’t smell dusty. She could not abide that smell of disuse. Or washing the car once a week, even if she’d used it only once, when she’d had to take Penfield to the vet for his shots.

Charlie had brought levity to her table, that’s why she had married him, and without him, she’d grown rigid. A prankster, Charlie had been, and though now and then his immaturity had caused her to throw up her hands, secretly she adored it. He’d always made her feel young, and light.

Until that evening in September when he’d groaned at the dinner table. Thinking he was joking — he always was! — Carol rolled her eyes and issued her standard, “Oh, Charlie.” But for once he wasn’t fooling around. He died right there, still in the middle of eating his pie, and only fifty-six years old. When Carol flashed on the scene, she didn’t see Charlie. She saw his pie, and the forlorn way Mrs. Smith’s apples sat on the plate never failed to make her weep, even now, almost a decade after Charlie’s passing.

She was in the supermarket inspecting eggs for cracks when Charlie’s unfinished pie came to mind. The image, unbidden, unwelcome, still so vivid, flustered her. With trembling hands she picked up egg carton after egg carton but couldn’t find one that had twelve perfect eggs, eggs without fissures or breaks, eggs that didn’t look half-eaten like Charlie’s pie — damn him, couldn’t he have just finished that pie? She was breathless and red in the face when she felt someone behind her. She turned to find a seventy-something man, his beard and hair salt-and-pepper, his eyes bright and mischievous, his physique not trim, exactly, but no worse than her own.

{Originally posted on Jennifer Kirk Photography}

I’ll forever remember Paolina as the bride who hugged me after our first meeting. She and John told me about how they met and how quickly they fell in love… and they made my eyes well up!

They held the ceremony at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Vancouver, and reception on Granville Island. After a quick stop at Spanish Banks beach, we ran all over Granville Island to create some unique images… hitting our shoot locations at perfect timing for some great light!

Thanks Paolina and John, I had a blast. It’s always extra awesome to photograph two warm and generous people who are a lot of fun to hang out with!

{Originally published on Okay. Fine. Dammit.}

One of my best friends lived for some time with her great aunt in the finest home in which I have ever set foot.

It’s not that it was a mansion or anything, although I suspect by some definitions it was. Auntie was a wealthy woman, advanced in age and experience, and the widow of a founder of a large grocery store chain. Her home was modern, tucked like a jumbo gumdrop on the curved cul-de-sac window of an elaborate gingerbread-home-neighborhood in a wealthy Minnesotan suburb. From the outside it looked like your average run-of-the-mill parade home, as cookie-cutter and interchangeable as any McMansion. On the inside, it was anything but.

At the time, back in 1997, Dave and I were newlyweds and we had just purchased our first house. It was large, and fine, and I was utterly intimidated by it. When I went to visit my friend I had lived in my new home for several months, but the overwhelming majority of my belongings were still packed in boxes. I was so afraid that I would ruin my beautiful new house with my silly, shabby, adolescent stuff. I used to walk through the door of my own home and feel like an uninvited guest, or worse, like the girl invited out of pity, out of place among my fancy, rich, important peers. The modest apartment we’d moved from may have had sloping floors and a two foot gash through the front screen door, but it was home. It didn’t make me feel inferior, unworthy.

Auntie’s house changed my life. Even all these years later, I still recognize and honor the impact. I don’t know how to describe the decor, and that’s the point; She didn’t follow a single rule. She didn’t care what you thought, or how you defined her. She was patently original.

There was an entire room devoted to her ethnic roots, wallpapered in the colors and traditions of her home flag. There was art everywhere, and mostly in unexpected places – like above the dog bowl, or sideways and at eye-level next to the couch where you might like to lie. There were books everywhere, and places to sit and dream at every turn…

Now that we have our newfangled direct submissions form, I have been struggling to tighten up our “About” page. In all honesty, I am simply too close to it.

How do you define what we do at Blog Nosh Magazine?

I look at our goals:

• encourage readers to consider content from genres they would otherwise not seek out on their own, done largely by juxtaposing posts in seemingly dichotomous genres side-by-side in our daily features (for instance, we recently published a post about finding the right church next to a post about gay marriage, resulting in emails of the “Thank you, I never would have read that blog…” variety)
• encourage bloggers to not farm out (unpaid) previously unpublished original content to larger sites, in direct detriment to the quality and quantity of their own personal blog posts (this is why we do not accept previously unpublished submissions)
• foster the understanding that personal blogs are not all fluff but actually do churn out magazine-quality content on a daily basis, largely for the art of writing and conviction (when you don’t have to answer to The Man, you are more likely to let your freak flag fly: aka your true colors fearlessly, or at the very least less fearfully, show)

Regardless of how I define our efforts, I still find blog posts raving about us but simultaneously referring to us as a feed aggregator. Or I feel a personal twinge of guilt when I read posts that deter writers from sharing their content for free, in exchange for a byline and free publicity.

One) We are not an automatic feed aggregator. Our content is hand selected by editors, culled from their personal blog reading and via direct submissions. We are an online literary magazine striving to advocate the value of personal blogs by highlighting the strongest content out there, often content that has fallen into the dark and dusty archives of blogs, rarely to be seen again.

Two) I would love to pay for every post we republish, but we simply can’t. Yet. As is the case with most online publications. The difference with us is that we don’t ask you to write anything new…

{Originally posted on Barking Mad.}

I had a linguistics professor who said that it’s man’s ability to use language that makes him the dominant species on the planet. That may be. But I think there’s one other thing that separates us from animals. We aren’t afraid of vacuum cleaners.” –Jeff Stilson

I knew it was too good to last. It’s been more than a year since I’ve had something go wrong with a domestic appliance, be it a personal hair remover or something not intended for use on the human body. Oh and this one doesn’t count because seriously, it could have happened to anyone! It could!

Yesterday wasn’t any different from most of my days spent around Casa Barking Mad, except that the Little Imp was at Montessori for the day and the groomer had come to pick up Casey after the discovery that the spawn of our neighbour, Creepy Whistling Dude, have been throwing shitloads of chewed gum into our backyard. Alas, a big-ass post about that is forthcoming. So whilst I was sitting here wondering if my dog was going to be returned with any hair or not, I decided to obsessively clean, like I normally do.

I’ll have you know, I have never suffered any sort of injury from a domestic appliance until now. I swear!

The culprit, a Dyson Animal…

{Originally Published on Production, Not Reproduction}

I haven’t said anything about my daughter’s first (birth) dad in awhile. Truthfully, I’ve not known how to comfortably approach it here. I am sorting through conflicting thoughts and feelings about him. It is hard to know what is appropriate to share.

After a chance meeting at a pizza place with an adoption agency social worker, he did go into the office to meet with her before Firefly was born. It was…less than positive. He had already made clear that he felt no obligation toward Beth (our daughter’s first mom), and as of now he apparently feels no obligation toward his daughter either. Nobody has heard from him since.

My husband and I have never spoken with him. We’ve never even seen a picture of him. We know his name and his age and some sketchy medical history. My amateur sleuthing hasn’t turned up any online presence for him, so I can’t peek at his life through Myspace or Facebook. He is a complete mystery to me. Yet he is one-half of my daughter’s genetic heritage.

This is uncharted territory for our family. Our son’s first dad, Ray, has been around from the beginning. It’s easy to include him in what we say to Puppy: “Kelly and Ray made you, they took care of you, they decided we would be parents to you. You have his smile, his hair, his eyes.” Ray underscores it all through his continued presence in Puppy’s life. I feel like Firefly’s story thus far has a glaringly missing player. What do I say about a man who chooses to ignore her? What do I say about a man about whom I know next to nothing?

One day before Firefly’s birth I sat down with Beth and laid how we had approached our relationship with Puppy’s first parents. Our priority has always been maintaining healthy relationships for Puppy. So our separate relationships with Kelly and Ray are our business and their relationship with each other is their business–we don’t take sides when there is friction between them and Puppy doesn’t get put in the middle of anything. I told Beth that we knew Firefly’s dad hadn’t done right by her. That we didn’t want her to think that us wanting a relationship with him meant we condoned that or didn’t care about it. Yet none of that changed the fact that Firefly still deserved to know him. The only thing we would expect from her would be to not to stand in the way if he ever started up a relationship with us.

It’s not that cut and dried, of course. It’s not like we can truly separate everyone into their own corners of our life. Beth is the one who is becoming our friend, who vulnerably opened up her life to us–and who received us likewise. She’s shown her commitment to this budding open adoption in myriad ways. Her opinions matter to us, including her opinions on Firefly’s dad…

{Originally posted on Life and Thoughts of a Midwest Geek}
Today, we celebrate a tradition in our nation unlike any other in the world. Today, we transition from one president to the next.

The 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution has set January 20th as the date on which one president ends their administration and next begins.

The President-elect is sworn in at noon by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court using the Oath of Office from Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution and reads,

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States

Every president since George Washington has had to state these words to the public with these words as their bond.

I like to point out these words to everyone for it demonstrates one of our Founding Father’s most important ideals. This nation is bound together by one thing…

{Originally published at Shamelessly Sassy}

When I was five, my mother married a monster of a man, the scariest person I had ever met. She was married to him until I was seven. It is safe to say that I spent those two years of my life scared of my own shadow, and I think I’ll spend the rest of my years recovering.

The monster spent a large portion of his time punching holes in the walls that mother tried to hold up single handedly. He also threatened daily to drive us off of a local bridge or back the car into the local lake with us inside.

(I still hate that lake.)

The monster was full of mostly empty threats, and he was eaten up with heavy doses of crazy. Even his eyes looked crazy, always opened as wide as he could possibly muster. As far as staying went, the last year and a half of the marriage, my mother stayed with him out of fear. Live with him or else he might really drive us off of a bridge or burn our house down with us inside.

With the monster, you never knew.

For those two years, I felt as if I would never get out from under his thumb. At age 6, I felt like our lives, particularly the end of them, were resting firmly in his hands. I didn’t think I would see my tenth birthday. Most likely I would be sitting at the bottom of the lake in a car with my mother and my younger brother. Feeling as if I might have died in the near future was a part of my everyday life, and it was so miserable. It was nothing that a girl of five, six, and seven should ever have to do. I knew that.

Luckily, the monster never managed to hit me. That doesn’t mean he didn’t try. I was small and fast. I excelled at running and hiding from him. The only time he came close I had warm salt water in my hand, I had just lost a tooth. So I threw it in his face. That was that…

The Blog Nosh Magazine audience is a curious one to me, as your slightly distracted but passionate publisher and editor-in-chief. Are you mostly bloggers yourselves or actual pure readers who don’t insist on grabbing your own share of the pixelated spotlight? (And I say that with love, as I am one of those spotlight grubbers.)

Let’s find out, shall we?

I recently attended the BlissDom blog conference in Nashville. The attendance was heavily women bloggers, which was appropriate for me because I am both a woman and a blogger and even occasionally the epitome of that combination: The Mommyblogger…

{Originally published on uuMomma.}

Earlier in the week my neighbor said she had a wedding to go to Thursday night. I wondered, who would plan a wedding on a Thursday night? Fast forward to Thursday night when my husband and I are having a late dinner at a very nice restaurant in town, surrounded by young couples and one older couple with their 9 year old son. Doh! It’s Valentine’s Day, that’s why someone would have a wedding on a Thursday night, same reason we would have dinner at 8:30 on a Thursday (okay, wait, that’s not so unusual).

So I pictured the young couple getting married on Valentine’s Day, people I’ve never met and may never meet. Knowing this neighbor as I do, I was able to spin out a fictional representation of that wedding that was startlingly uninteresting. I pictured a pink face surrounded by white lace. I knew she must be a virgin (as this IS what the church dictates for this group) which actually could be an interesting twist to weddings today. I pictured the groom in a black tux and the pink face, white lace and ruddy red and eager-face of the groom show off strikingly against a giant red heart in the background.

So that’s the image that floated to my head as I had my Homer Simpson moment of realization that some couples do get married or engaged on Valentine’s Day. This unknown bride’s presumed virginity caused me to remember something someone once said to me about why she married a man she had known only a few months. “I wanted to have sex with him,” she said, “and back then, you got married if you wanted to do that.”

It was a naive notion, even back in the 50s, but she was a good girl and so she got married. More than 50 years later, this woman is still married to that man and they continue to have a relationship founded not on their desire to have sex (the thought of which causes me to stick my fingers in my ears and go ‘la la la la la’), but to be in love with each other enough to wait for commitment in the first place, and to stay in love through all the trials that that commitment has laid at their collective door.