about that last post

it's funny.  i felt funny posting about capture the flag yesterday.  it's funny that i felt funny.

i've rolled this around a bunch over quite a number of months - what sort of blog this is - and i keep coming back to the fact that it's not any sort categorizable blog at all.  (is it?)  at least not as i think about "the categories" - craft blog, mama blog, blog full of lovely links.  

i don't really chronicle my artwork here - i mean, i mention it, but i don't write about it regularly or share everything that i'm painting or working on - though often i wish that i did keep a better record here of what's happening in my own creative process.

and i don't really chronicle my family life here either.  they're private sorts, my husband and our children, and since this isn't their blog, i try to respect their privacy.  as much as possible.  though i did earn some points with my private son when i was able to recover his recipe for sesame noodles supreme by googling it, since he gave me permission to share it here last fall.

once, many months ago now, i stumbled across a blog with a long blog roll on the sidebar - the blogs were categorized: design blogs, craft blogs, mommy blogs, other interesting blogs.  i was in the "other interesting blogs" category.  i remember being taken aback, at the time - i suppose that when you're a mother, it's hard to imagine that you could fall into any category other than the mother category - but that was when i first realized that i don't write so much about my life as a mother in this space.

maybe that's why i felt funny writing about capture the flag.  it's not my usual subject matter (what is my usual subject matter!?), nothing to do with anything really, other than my life as a mother.  our life as a family.  that's why i turned the comments off, i guess.

but why did i feel compelled to write about capture the flag in the first place?  if it has nothing to do with the sorts of things that i generally write about here?  aha.  

i thought i knew.  i thought i was going to type the next sentence and say that i wrote about it here because it was such a glorious night that i wanted to preserve it and share it.  but as i was about to type that sentence i realized that i've known all along exactly why i wrote about capture the flag in this space yesterday.  only i didn't realize that i knew it until this very minute.

whenever i talk to people about why i keep this blog, i talk about finding the beauty in small things.  i talk about finding the beauty and acknowledging the beauty and celebrating the beauty as a way of inviting more beauty into my life.  and, of course, that's exactly why i wrote about capture the flag here yesterday - because it was a beautiful evening.  it was a little idea that turned into a great celebration of friendship and summertime and sweaty children and cold beer and late evenings in the yard with fireflies.  and i wanted to capture that, to celebrate it, to hold it up as a reminder of what can be, to invite more of those extraordinary moments into my life.