The Girl Effect

Prayer Request

Our favorite babysitter, beautiful Keely, was in a church bus accident yesterday in Alabama. She was chaperoning a bus full of middle schoolers on their way to a youth camp. I'm told that she's in ICU. They have put pins in her arm and they are having to do reconstructive surgery today on her face.

Keely is more beautiful than anyone inside and out. Last year when my daughter had her as a teacher, I could always tell when Keely was working because my girl would be soooo mellow and at peace after spending time with her. She just has that presence.

Last summer she raised money so that she could go to an orphanage in Honduras to do mission work. We just couldn't adore anyone any more than Keely. Please pray for her.

The Zen of Peggy Sue & Videotape

my new post available on Skirt!.

Cha Cha Cha

Love this shoot from the amazing Davina Fear.

It captures that feeling of just moving in together and so much more. I love the dance photos - light and movement - the ones taken outside the window, and from a distance. So great.

I've been experimenting lately with setting up scenes inside the house to photograph while I stand outside. It is so much fun, like setting up a diorama, but so challenging.

Goodness

I know I'm frequently plugging Shutter Sisters, but this post, The Things We Hold, is so spectacular. Click over if you have a chance to check it out.

In concludes by asking readers this most eloquent question:

"What kind of goodness have you discovered lately in somebody's hands?"

"We all have our moments of brilliance & glory, and this was mine." --Roald Dahl from The Great Mouse Plot

The bath toys and I have been at war for many months. The Boon frog's modern design wasn't equipped for my 50 year bathroom and its native tile.

The turtle suction cup thing fell off several times and always at 2:00 a.m. sounding very much like a clumsy intruder.

Something about the colander intended for pasta over the sink cried out for a greater purpose...

take that bath toys.

The Promise of Friday

My new post for Skirt! is here.

Skirt! Amore

I picked a college based on proximity to salty air. My favorite college afternoons involved sand on my toes and a Skirt! magazine in my hands, reading personal narratives written by amazing women.

When I was in England, my mom would send me copies of the most recent issue that was always inspiring, splashed with color and optimism. I remember carrying a tea-stained copy from train to train until it was too crumpled to read.

It's absolutely aces to have Skirt! in my community now and I am thrilled to announce that I have joined the Skirt! team as one of their bloggers where I'm supposed to post around 4 times per week.

I'll continue to post here as well and I will try to link my posts over at Skirt! so that both blogs will have original content going. To see my first, tiny, baby post at Skirt!, click here.

Love, thanks and appreciation to you for taking time to stop by.

Joe Fox: "You wrote her letters?"

Schuyler Fox:

Mail. It was called mail.

Nelson Fox (Dabney Coleman):

Stamps. envelopes.

Joe Fox (Tom Hanks):

You know, I've heard of it.

I adore mail. I'm so excited about these new Eames stamps released June 17th. Aren't they beautiful?

You can buy them here.

Thursday Inspiration

Where My Heart Ends, Yours Begins

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Our dear friend Katy, who I love so much and who, incidently, we met in Ireland, sent me this today.

It's like a perfect Valentine in June and such a much needed reminder of how full of wonder the world can be and that in spite of all that the news media spends time on, there are people dancing and laughing and looking for commonalities at this moment, in this time.

As Dr. Angelou has written in her poem, Human Family, "we are more alike my friends, than we are unalike."

Thank you Katy, for the gift of friendship found in a different country, and at home, all at the same time.

Things I Didn't Know 24 Hours Ago

1. That we would wake up at 5 a.m. to the sounds of a large animal clawing in the wall.
2. That there are companies called things like "Wildlife Solutions" who will come to your house and tape up an open vent in the afternoon just to, "see what happens".
3. That at 11 p.m., the nocturnal animal would throw itself into the tape again and again until busting out.
4. That all of this would sound very similar to the sound effects engineered for the film Signs in those scenes where the aliens scurried along the roof as Joaquin tells the children, "run children, run!"
5. That said creature, a momma raccoon looking for a place to have her babies, would perch on our roof at midnight while we sprayed her with the hose and simulated cat hissing noises fashioned after the angry raccoon in Elf (who just needed a hug).
6. That according to the Wildlife guy, she'll be back around 4 or 5 a.m. tomorrow cause, "Yep. You can pretty much set your watch by a raccoon."
7. That I would be thinking about forging a stake-out, though I have no idea what I'll do once confronting her again if the other antics were unsuccessful.
8. That despite all the yard work we have done, we're still The Beales of Grey Gardens with raccoons and the cat and S-T-A-U-N-C-H and so on.
9. That my good-for-nothing pets, one of whom who wails all night on a regular basis, would pretend not to notice that a large animal is practically body bowling in the attic.

I just didn't know.

Goonies to Great

Check this post from John Mayer's blog remembering the 1985 film The Goonies.

It's a great post, from a thoughtful guy. What I love most is this part:

What happened to the better part of a generation that once walked out of their local theater rooting for the Mikeys and Chunks and Datas of the world? They've turned into Troys. Troys who can't accept the differences in others and condemn the things they don't understand. Finger-pointing, shit-talking Troys.

Ask yourself: with whom do you identify more these days, Troy or the Goonies? And if you're reading this and you happen to be an Internet shit-talker, could it be because you think I'm Troy? Because honest to God, I've always fancied myself a Goonie; the underdog who toppled over the narrow-minded naysayers and walked away with a treasure.

So maybe this whole thing is one big misunderstanding and it turns out we don't need to go down as a generation remembered as having spent the '00s wearing our asses like hats after all. Maybe it will turn out that we needed a little time to figure out that in the end we're all just a bunch of Goonies.

Wacky Wednesday

I love this. Good lord, I feel like I have this conversation at least once a week with someone and walk away wondering if I will have to start secretly stockpiling Oreos for my daughter in the event of a ban by the surgeon general.
The music sampled in this is from one of my ALL TIME FAVORITES Badly Drawn Boy.

Monday Inspiration

As this post from Kate Inglis of Shutter Sisters shares beneath her beautiful photograph of a butterfly:

They only live for ten hours, you know, or three days, or barely a week, or something like that, said Justin to me gently, puzzled as to why I stood there with the ailing butterfly in my hand. And I thought well then that's a lifetime, and a whole new way to think about ten hours or three days or barely a week.

You are good and beautiful and perfect, I whispered to the butterfly as he wriggled faintly, beaten by a broken wing. He seemed to be listening. You go on to be an elephant or a brook trout or a tiny baby boy, and have fantastic adventures of a whole new kind. You take your glorious yellow with you, thread it into your next soul so we all can admire it forever.

This morning I went back to the hosta and he'd been blown by the wind into its stem forest. I righted him, delicate as he was, already having lost the moisture and suppleness of life, and spoke to him again but this time he was elsewhere, and all that seemed left was just his shell.

But I know better.

Amazing isn't she?

A Quick Plug for Kind, Talented People

Our friend Kevin Johnston is appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on June 25th to promote his online show, The All For Nots.
Check it out.

My friend Jennifer Bradbury has published an amazing novel, Shift, and it's getting great reviews. Good summer reading from the coolest girl. Click the link above for the Amazon listing.

One True Thing

I know there will be times in our lives that I will not be what my daughter needs or wants.

I will inadvertently let her down at times.

But the one thing that gives me the most comfort is that, regardless of anything else, the most perfect thing I will ever do in my life is find her the most incredible guy who would become her father.

Passages

It begins slowly.

We put away the tiny socks, the mobile, the gemini. I folded up the onesies. The bottles and black and white patterned toys go to Goodwill.

Then the pace of everything escalates: the boppies have no more use, the baby tub, the high chair, the things I tied on the crib rails that sing, the pack-n-play.

Just as these items trickled into my home one-by-one, their names new to me like learning the vocabulary of a new language, they rapidly outlive their usefulness for my once very tiny soft baby, who now tries to stand on them or use them to build forts.

The gear in the storage area begins to talk to me at night: asking me why I'm holding on to it.

Someone else could be using me.

Are you sure I will be used again?

Will I be outdated when you turn on my switch next time?

I ask myself the same question.

The smaller gear is not as pushy about leaving.

The pacifiers went away in February.

The diapers in May, and with them, the changing table.

The crib is coming down this weekend.

It is the last vestige of the way her room looked the day we brought her home from the hospital.

It's exciting to watch her (and her room) evolve from baby to young girl. And it is a reminder at how fast it all happens.

I once came home from College (753 miles from home) unnannounced. I was the last to go away to school, and the last to leave an empty room behind. When I opened the backdoor by the kitchen, my mother was standing at the end of the long hallway, carrying a laundry basket into the guest room where she folds clothes. She stopped and glanced up at me and continued walking. When I said her name, she ran back into the hallway saying, "Oh my God! It's really you!"

"But, you just looked at me," I said.

"I see you girls here all the time. I didn't think you were actually here."

I know what she means now.

I walk into my little baby girl's room now and I still see her learning to crawl, pulling up on things, even when she walks past me to put on her clothes

all by herself.