To be a blogger you have to make a commitment to write posts. Frequently. Often. You don’t want readers to come and look at your blog and go ‘ah, I already read this.’ They won’t come back if you don’t give them a reason to; you have to keep it fresh. New content. What if you have nothing to say? You say you’re a writer. Make something up.

I recently took a ten hour drive to see my kids. It’s hard on a parent to watch their child struggle. You want to step in and say ‘I’ve made this mistake before. Here’s how you fix it- but you can’t, for two reasons.

One, part of growing up is failure. You learn more from your failures than your successes. They need to learn how to fly, and they also need to crash and burn a few times. It’s hard to watch them rise from the ashes and try again. That in a nutshell is adulthood. You know you did a good job when they have the nerve, the balls, and courage to try again. In my humble opinion, a lot of kids haven’t been allowed to fail enough as children so they can’t handle it as adults. Maybe I shouldn’t be so proud of my kids, but boy, can they fail. I’m even more proud they don’t let it hold them back.

And two, they don’t want to hear it. Butt out, mom, you’re so old things are way different than when you were young. They think I went to my senior prom with Fred Flintstone. Things have changed, and a lot of it not for the better. Our kids are stressed out. Stress we never had to deal with, which raises the stakes for success. It is even more incredible when despite of it all they stand up to try again. And again. God bless them. I don’t have good kids, I have great kids.

When I asked them what they thought of my blog one of them said ‘you have a blog?’ The other said ‘I like your photographs.’ So I guess this whole brand awareness thing is going to be harder than I thought. Here’s a photograph of the wisteria in bloom. It’s so beautiful this picture doesn’t do it justice. I could look at it as I failed to execute my vision communicating how absolutely beautiful it is, but part of failure is accepting good enough. So this is the best I could do. Enjoy. They’re predicting snow this Friday. At least it’s spring somewhere.