I almost forgot!

For the first time in three months, I remembered to post at Hopeful Parents. 

Please go on over and visit there -- leave a comment, browse around. There's some really great writing and good resources for those of you who have children with special healthcare needs.

And since the post is about my video project, tell anyone you know who might be interested to read it as well.

Angels

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

- Wendell Berry
  1970

I'm over at Hopeful Parents today.

A Pampered Chef Giveaway

What's a pampered chef?

I have no idea. The Husband is a chef but he is so NOT the pampered chef. He works, literally, twelve to eighteen hours a day and owns his own business, better known on this blog as The Mistress. When people tell me you're so lucky to be married to a chef, I roll my eyes. Sometimes they even roll all the way backward into my head and fall out, back there.

What's a Hopeful Parent? 

A hopeful parent of a child with special healthcare needs is a parent who periodically goes insane with the burden of it all and then bounces back, miraculously, it would seem. I suppose that makes me a hopeful parent, even if The Husband is NOT a Pampered Chef.

What does this have to do with a giveaway?

We have exactly one week left before the Pampered Chef fundraiser at the Hopeful Parents blog closes. Hopeful Parents is giving away a $50 gift certificate redeemable through the Pampered Chef. Here are the rules:

1. Visit the Hopeful Parents homepage here and direct your eyes (mine are still rolling around in my head) to the sidebar to place your order. You will be entered into a raffle for a $50 gift certificate to the Pampered Chef.

2. If you write a blog post encouraging your friends to participate in the Pampered Chef fundraiser AND publish a link to the Hopeful Parents home page, directing your readers to our sidebar to place their orders -- well, you'll be entered in the raffle.

3. If you do make a purchase through the Pampered Chef fundraiser and send an email to writehopefulparents [at] gmail [dot] com, indicating that you heard about the Pampered Chef fundraiser from me, rolling eyes me from a moon, worn as if it had been a shell, and my email which is elsophie [at] gmail [dot] com, you AND I will BOTH be entered into the raffle for the $50 gift certificate from the Pampered Chef. (And as the wife of a CHEF, I'm not pampered, so this would be a windfall for me!)

4. In your message, please include your name, blog name and email address. Anonymity is fine, but they do need an email address in case you win. Go on over to Hopeful Parents and check the sidebar for all the links. And if none of this makes sense, it will when you go over there.

HAVE FUN!

I'm over at Hopeful Parents, trying to be hopeful

Please go on over and leave a comment -- and check out some of the other essays -- there's a lot of wonderful writing over at

Hopeful Parents.

More Spring

It's my day, again, to post over at Hopeful Parents, a really wonderful blog. You can read it by clicking here.

It's also the first day of Spring, so here's another photo and a poem.







Poem on a Line by Anne Sexton, 'We are All Writing God's Poem'

by Barbara Crooker

Today, the sky's the soft blue of a work shirt washed
a thousand times. The journey of a thousand miles
begins with a single step. On the interstate listening
to NPR, I heard a Hubble scientist
say, "The universe is not only stranger than we
think, it's stranger than we can think." I think
I've driven into spring, as the woods revive
with a loud shout, redbud trees, their gaudy
scarves flung over bark's bare limbs. Barely doing
sixty, I pass a tractor trailer called Glory Bound,
and aren't we just? Just yesterday,
I read Li Po: "There is no end of things
in the heart," but it seems like things
are always ending—vacation or childhood,
relationships, stores going out of business,
like the one that sold jeans that really fit—
And where do we fit in? How can we get up
in the morning, knowing what we do? But we do,
put one foot after the other, open the window,
make coffee, watch the steam curl up
and disappear. At night, the scent of phlox curls
in the open window, while the sky turns red violet,
lavender, thistle, a box of spilled crayons.
The moon spills its milk on the black tabletop
for the thousandth time.