When my daughter was born, I'm ashamed to say the first thing I noticed was the length of her toes.  While the doctors and nurses commented on her precious face, framed by a head full of dark hair, a single thought resonated through my mind, narrated by my father's imaginary voice...  Oh Lord, she's inherited your tater toes! She could probably grip a limb with those babies!

         In case you're wondering, "tater toes" is an expression invented by my father to describe a phenomenon when one's toes resemble an order of McDonalds french fries.  And now, I'm very proud to report the expression will continue its vibrant life through my daughter.  Though she's still a toddler, I have absolutely no worries that she'll be able to hold her own even under the heaviest of scrutiny.

         Case in point:  I dress her to the nines when we leave the house, pulling her long brown hair into a little fountain ponytail on top.  Of course, an hour later, she's already pulled it out, hair hanging straight down into her eyes, looking like the offspring of Cousin It.

         While at the grocery store, an elderly woman smiles and says, "She's so adorable!"

         "Thank you," I say, while looking at my daughter, who has an index finger jammed into her right nostril.  I nonchalantly pull her hand away, and she swiftly returns the finger to its former position while staring defiantly at me.  This continues until the admirer walks away.

         Ah parenthood, there's really nothing like it, is there?  And as I ponder this, I glance across the room at my precious baby girl, who is vigorously shaking a floor lamp as though she is trying to get it to drop some sort of fruit.

         "No, no, Charlotte, don't do that!"

         She smiles and jams an index finger up her nose, a toddler's version of the middle finger.

Dreams are so fascinating and often serve us well as writers.  If we choose, we can use them to ride the tides of inspiration and create some wonderful stories.  Other times, perhaps we'd rather just thank God they aren't real and forget about them completely.

I woke up from an awful nightmare this morning, the kind where every muscle in my body ached when it was finished. This one included some extra special effects that made it particularly nasty.  I dreamed I was in a place that didn't resemble home at all. Something didn't feel quite right, so I lifted my shirt and there were at least fifty cockroaches crawling all over my abdomen.  I swear, if I were a horror writer, all of my stories would have cockroaches in them. I'm convinced they crawl here through the cracks of hell.

Quickly, I jumped up and began smacking them, but instead of falling off, their carcasses clung to me like an awful jelly with legs, only Smuckers wouldn't make a dime on this variety.  I couldn't seem to will my hands into wiping them off so they just continued to hang there. The dream finally ended while I was meandering around this strange place, raising my shirt every so often to look at the cockroach jelly on my abdomen, still too anxious to wipe it clean.

Freud would have a field day with me, wouldn't he?

Our subconscious is a funny thing, isn't it?  It's like a tiny person separate from us who sits inside our heads and watches our personal daytime soap opera on a television set behind our eyes.  Then, every so often, the little prankster plays a trick on us while we sleep at night by slipping a demented horror flick into the DVD player. 

I'd like to flick the little bugger out of there and squash him flat, like a cockroach. 

In experiencing this latest latest feverish funk my two-year-old daughter has passed on to me, I'm finding myself feeling a bit squirrely in a gathering all the nuts to head off the next haulocaust sort of way.  True, it could be the effects of the medication.  The doctor has me on steroids right now and I've heard that can make anyone absolutely crazy, so I'm at a toss as to whether I should go pump some iron or tear up the house. 

Actually, I've been rummaging through the garbage can because I think I may have accidentally thrown my sense of humor away with my last popsickle stick.  Well... that's not entirely true. I think I fell asleep on my humor and it's currently stuck to my backside... or maybe that's where it's always been.

Anyway, enough about that nonsense, please allow me to introduce myself.  I am a southern writer from Atlanta Georgia, mostly free-verse poetry, mainstream fiction and creative nonfiction.  I've found myself attempting to dabble in a little bit of comedy lately... BIG emphasis on the words "attempting" and "dabble".  Please stick with me, though, I promise it will get better.  Being the married mother of two young children, my son age 5 and my daughter age 2, I can promise I'll have plenty of material to  serve as inspiration. 

As with most writers, my characters are often based on real people. Reading blogs is a great way to get ideas for characters and what I will often do is jot down random bullets about people I know (or don't know); just to sort of serve as ideas for cute little anecdotes I can put inside my stories. So that being said... here are 25 random bullets that I've jotted down about myself.

25 Things About Me

1. I was born in a very small town in South Georgia. For some reason, there are roosters running loose all over the place. The town is famous for this. Don't ask me why.

2. My first dog's name was Foots. She was a bassett hound mix. My first cat was Sniffles. He was a bad-ass tomcat.

3. My first word was "danshee". It means, "sandwich".

4. When I was 3, I carried around a towel that I named Mary. She had little pink roses on her.

5. When I was 4, my mother taught me how to play the piano and I apparently took to it very well. I played throughout school and won several medals and what-not. Suffered from a bit of stage fright so I didn't really like participating in contests or concerts. Quit playing when I was 18 and I haven't played a single note since. I'm not even sure I could do it anymore. I haven't tried.

6. I lost my first baby tooth on the first day of first grade.

7. My first crush was a little boy named Craig. He was beautiful. Blonde with blue eyes. I was in the 3rd grade. I'd often go over to his house and we'd play with his car tracks. He'd come over to my house and we'd jump on my trampoline. Just before fifth grade, my family and I moved away to Florida. I was absolutely heartbroken over leaving Craig behind.

8. I went through what one could only characterize as "my dork years" in middle school. I was 5'6" and only 85 pounds in the 7th grade. And I had braces. I was not a pretty sight. Apparently, I also come from a long line of skinny ancestors with crooked teeth... who cursed a lot.

9. I once received 3 days of suspension from school for stealing earthworms from the biology lab and putting them in my friend's clarinet case. Something about possible property damage from the formaldehyde.

10. My first car was a Datsun B210. When you cranked it up, it sounded like a sewing machine.

11. I hated to read in school. Hated it. Imagine that now. When I was in my late-twenties, I decided to go back and read all the books that I never read in school, just so I could say I read them.

12. I flunked Algebra in high school. I had to go to summer school. It was such a drag. One day, we lit a fire cracker in the restroom. The thing didn't go off until we'd got back to the classroom and, of course, we got caught because we giggled like crazy when it did. It was really a stupid thing to do, I suppose. These days, you'd get arrested for committing a terrorist act or something.

13. For a few years, I was a volunteer cabin counselor one weekend each year in November for an event called Camp STARS. It's sponsored by the local Hospice near where I live.

14. I've had two babies that were each over 9 pounds. C-sections for both and I thank God for that every day!

15. Instead of dining room furniture, I have a slide and a toddler jungle gym in my dining room. There is an office with a computer a few feet away where I sometimes write.

16. During naps and at night, I write from my personal laptop up in my study that's wedged between the kids rooms. Typically, I lounge on the bed with the laptop on a little "lap table" in front of me. I listen to music on my iPOD while I write, or I have a noise maker that makes the sound of ocean waves, waterfall or rain. I play it while I'm deep in the throes of writing something. It's where I am right now, listening to the "rain".

17. When I go anywhere in the car without my kids, I find a radio station that is playing anything that doesn't remotely sound like Blues Clues or Elmo and I turn it up real loud. Imagine a woman driving a minivan with two empty child seats in the back and Dave Matthews screaming from the windows, and you have me.

18. I'm a fan of many different types of music, but my favorite song in the whole wide world is "In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel. It's actually the ringtone on my cell phone.

19. On the occasions I wear perfume (which doesn‘t happen very often anymore), I only wear one kind. It's called Anais Anais. I've worn it for almost twenty-five years.

20. When I was little, I was allergic to EVERYTHING! Dairy, tomatoes, nuts, citrus, chocolate, every kind of grass but one, every kind of tree but two... It was awful. When we moved to Florida, my allergies disappeared. Something about living near the ocean for 15 years, I reckon.

21. When I was little, I could jump on a pogo stick without hanging on to it (I guess I had really strong legs)

22. I had my first kiss when I was in the 8th grade. It was next to a culvert at the end of the street. When we finished, I tripped over the culvert and landed on my bum. True story. Which leads to the obvious...

23. I tend to be a little bit on the clumsy side. Which leads to the ironic...

24. I've never broken a bone before (she says, as she heavily knocks on wood) but I have blackened my eyes 3 different times in my life. I'll reserve those stories for another post.

25. My son's former teacher often calls and asks if she can babysit. He's just one of those kids you never forget about.

26. My daughter is growing more beautiful by the day. (Okay, so that was 26 things. I couldn't leave my daughter out.)

Okay, so as you've probably guessed, this probably isn't going to be your typical sort of blogl.  Here, you're going to find a grand mix of things including crazy stories about my life, my slightly skewed perspective on things as well as some general goofiness. I hope you'll enjoy your time here and decide to stay for a while.