The first day.

I have this fantasy of myself.  It's a lovely picture when I paint it inside my brain.  Start with my little suburban backyard, the very same one I played in as a girl (I am fortunate enough to be raising my family in the house I was raised in, but that is another post.)  My husband is in his woodshop with the door open and the sounds of his saw cutting through his latest handiwork floats out on the summer breeze.  Our children are playing with our dog and I have the baby in a sling on my back, chickens clucking around my muck boots while I work in the garden and hang hand dyed cloth diapers on the clothes line.  Ahhh....collective sigh.  And of course, like the coolest of crunchy, suburban, house moms....in my fantasy, I blog.

Today is February 15, pouring rain with a high of 57 degrees.  The weather this winter has been bizarre, even for Arkansas.  Two days ago we woke up to pouring snow and ecstatic boys who would surely be disappointed by 3 p.m. when the sun would come out and melt it all.  It's been a bit disappointing for all of us...no need for hot chocolate, no sledding, no snowball fights. The daffodils all bloomed early for a January of 60 degree highs, but after this recent 2 day freeze, they are all hanging their yellow heads. Mosquitoes have already begun to breed, and if we forget to shut the screen door completely, we will find ourselves slapping the nasty little things off our arms...in February!  And perhaps the most inconvenient side effect of a winter with no backbone and a spring with no reserve, my dog's biological clock seems to have been fooled by the hasty warm-up and he has begun shedding his winter coat a full 2 months early.  As I am 36 weeks pregnant and simultaneously exhausted and desperate for a clean house, small collections of German Shepherd hair congregating under every table and in every corner are driving me mad.
However, for this day only, I am happy about the oddity of this winter's weather. Today is the day I have decided to start making my fantasy a reality and I'm quite thankful for the rain pounding outside my open window.  It inspires me to write, to seize this wet and warmish day and mark it as the beginning of sharing my life through words.
Although today will be my first post, this blog has been registered for quite a while now under a name that came to me in a dream, "The Hodgepodge Darling".  I like things to be eccentric. Hodgepodge.  I prefer for chairs not to match and faces to be asymmetrical.  Every room and outfit should be, in my opinion, an expression of creativity and when at all possible, an explosion of color.  A garden should have a bit of organized chaos to seem real.
There is something about the beautiful wildness nature has that makes me stand in awe of my Creator.  I've never been the type to stunt it, but I try in all ways to recreate it by having a life which is a hodgepodge of things I find wonderful.  This may not make sense yet, but continue to read and you'll understand. It's more easily showed than told anyhow.