Dear Bloggoramma,

Thank you x100 for always being there for me when I need a friend. When I need to organize my thoughts, whine, jump for joy, you are always there for me regardless of time zone, regardless of my insomnia, irregardless of vocab choices. My fingers don't hurt after typing, and my writing hasn't taken on 12 different styles until ending up a cross-eyed chicken scratch. You correct my spelling, organize my photos, waste no paper, and have no embarrassing food stains on white pages. I can tell you anything, and then you go and tell everybody. Its great. You really have fulfilled your purpose, so I thank you. And all who read and give me feed back, thank you.

In spite of taking maternity leave at my part-time job, all the baby books and baby prep, in spite of the late nights scanning documents at Kinko's or on the phone with the Embassy, there has been plenty to fill my head.
I got to go see two very inspiring authors speak this week. One is Greg Mortenson who wrote the book Three Cups of Tea, which I would buy and send to each person I know if I could. It is about his life path that brought him from growing up in Moshi, Tanzania (Augustino's home town!!) to trying to climb K2, saving lives, and ultimately, having his own life saved by the surrounding community who lives in the starkest conditions of poverty, and how his promise to build a school for the village children, turned into one of the most successful NGOs operating in that part of the world. He is amazing, his story is amazing, and you will be inspired and educated to read it, and certainly can contribute knowing that sending money to Greg would be the most efficient use of aid money you could imagine. Go to threecupsoftea.com to see why.
(Also, when I went to see him speak at the Huntington Beach High school gym, which was packed, I ran into a friend from Sonoma County, and was pleased, not just to see her, but that I saw her at an event that inspired me.)

The other author I met is Heather Flores, of Food not Lawns. She is a foodie-activist-superhero of saving souls through gardens, diving into dumpsters, and making food not bombs. She came to speak to the Holistic Moms group I associate with, and I followed her to a workshop she was doing at Pitzer college, one of the beautiful top-tier colleges clustered here in downtown Claremont, and so I am now connected with some space in a community garden to get my hands dirty, munch on herbs, crush and inhale lemon verbena, listen to the chickens, and share stories and potlucks with the bearded and beanied. I have been going a little crazy not having any soil under my fingernails or smelling the dirt for so long. So, after many spring days driving past blossoming tulip trees and other springtime blossoms, I pulled into a nursery and spent an hour drifting around, grinning foolishly and eating all the ripening clementine oranges, and finally picked out a lovely dwarf peach tree with pink blossoms that are about to pop and planted it for Elias with some strawberry plants below. It felt so good. It is raining these days, and I AM about to pop, but I now have this space to go to clear my head, and to bring my husband and baby, and to be there, with people like Lisa, who is also working a plot there and told me today about a Tent City settlement of 400+ homeless people here in Claremont that I knew nothing about.

So as the family comes together, and the world is coming together, the community is coming together, and this
is good.