December 4 – Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year? (Author: Jeffrey Davis)

I am a lover of words. A quote kind of person. (In fact, I have a "quote book" that I started when I was 12.) I have kept a journal of some sort for as long as I can remember. I gobble up books and read everything around me from labels on...but until this year, I had never got into the blogging world. 

  My family didn't have a computer in the house with the internet until 1998 when I was a senior in high school. (Dial up...ah!) By that point, final papers were required to be typed and using a typewriter was getting a tad bit out of hand. 

     All throughout college, when I wasn't at Tennis practice or some club meeting or type of fieldwork for my major, I was a cashier at Target. To be quite honest, the amount of time I spent on the internet was to the extent of drunk IM'ing with friends and doing research!

       Fast forward to 2010...domestication has slowly taken over. I am now a married, stay at home mom to an almost a one year old. Let the planning for  "THE" first birthday party begin. "THE" first birthday party becomes my labor of love. I am an artist by birth and now I get the chance to be more creative than I have in the past year and I start using Google like a mad woman. I start a notepad with one idea, which blossoms into something else and then something else develops. I start looking at fonts, templates and pictures on Flickr and I happen to stumble onto KevinandAmanda.com. I can't for the life of me figure out how I hadn't found this site years ago. 

               I freakin' love it. 

    I start talking about the site to friends. One of them tells me about an idea she found on a blog that is called  "something like JoyHope or something". So I set off to find the idea, which rapidly turns into hours of falling in love with this blog.  My curiosity had been piqued. 

   I wander around a little more and before long, I find myself getting enveloped in these blogs that these people have created of their everyday lives and I am no longer just looking for 1st birthday ideas. I am bookmarking these women's writings because I want to know what I will read next. I'm hooked and I begin to think that I could do this. I can gather my thoughts and ideas in a similiar place.

      For all the world to see. 

              Not intimidating in the slightest...

     But I take a leap. These words are a product of that leap...

               And it all started with wonder.