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Hi! I have been thinking a lot (too much) about how to start this blog, and then I decided it was better to just start the thing, so here goes...

Welcome to our family blog, a little spot where our family of four can share details and pictures (when I figure out how to upload them!) of our daily goings-on with other friends and family (Hi, Mom!).

First, a little on the name. Yes I know it is a mouthful and even harder to spell, but there is, I promise, a little background story here. One rainy afternoon, my 5-year-old son, Calvin, came up with the idea to make books at home. I wish I could claim this project as some product of my own supermom energy and creativity (like we followed book-making with homemade granola bars and drawing Chinese characters), but it was totally his baby.

Calling them "books" may be overstating it a bit, because they were really just single sheets of paper folded in half and then divided into three sections, covered by flaps and labeled with "B" for beginning, "M" for middle, and "E" for end. Behind each flap, we wrote one part of the story. Come to think of it, a lot of modern authors could really benefit from such a literary setup. It certainly helped me stay focused.

My little "book" featured me in the opening scene making a big pot of spaghetti on the stove. In the middle scene, Ivan, our fluffy white pooch, wanted to taste the spaghetti, so he jumped up to the stove to get a lick. Under the final flap, you see Ivan knocking the pot off the stove and then, well, you the idea: One big spaghetti mess. (This also happens to be the title of the little book.)

Not much of a story, I know. The illustrations aren't much better, because I did them myself. I told Calvin I was really better with words, not pictures, and that I needed an illustrator. But he insisted we needed to just get it done. (He would make a good editor.) So I did the illustrating on my own. I will try to upload a photo once I figure out how to do so--and can bring myself to publicize them.

Anyway, the story was pretty forgettable, but the title stuck. My husband, Noah, really latched on to it, to be honest, and declared it a good catchphrase for our household and our lives. He just thought it aptly described how we are often going about our daily routines, or sometimes making plans for the future or even just the weekend, and things inevitably fall apart, or they just don't go as you expect, or they just get, well, messy--in good ways and bad. It happens a lot when you have little kids, I guess. At least it happens a lot for us.

So now when we are talking to each other and describing our days or telling a story about how we, say, started out a simple car trip to get paper towels with two clean kids, and then someone throws up or has a tantrum (not always the kids!), and we have to stop the car to calm them or change clothes, and then we realize that we don't have extra clothes or wipes or paper towels (!), so we head back home and forget why we ever left anyway.

Or the car won't start and we're pretty sure the battery is dead, and we call AAA thinking they will solve the problem, and then they show up but then can't get the hood open, and then they tell us the problem isn't the dead battery but now it's the fact that we have a stuck hood. And then we get the car towed and the guys have to literally cut through the grill to get the hood open and then rewire the hood release. And oh yeah, they replace your battery for, like, $30, but then it costs more than $1000 for the hood nonsense.

Well, these are examples of stories that often end with one of us sighing and saying that it was "one big spaghetti mess." Welcome to our world.