A typical day at Chateau Mooney
I’ve had the itch to document my life as long as I can remember.
I had a blue Five Star notebook as a kid with PRIVATE written all over the cover in permanent marker and a lock acquired from Home Depot threaded through a hand-made hole-punch. I started blogging in middle school after discovering I could teach myself HTML and painstakingly crafted a Geocities site full of tables and ugly Photoshop collages of Lord of the Rings characters or little-known and easily forgotten San Diego Padres players (cringe). I moved on to my own domain name (I believe it was peaceful-confusion.com, also cringe) and then, like many adolescents before me, I documented my flaily teenage emotions daily on LiveJournal until I calmed down (a little) around sophomore year of college and my young adult emotions moved to a series of Moleskine notebooks filled during my morning quiet times and real conversations with others.
Now, at the midway point of my twenties, with a bit more of a settled heart and mind, I have not kept up with the documentation impulse, which I regret somewhat. While there are many things in my notebooks and various and sundry blogs that are not particularly worth remembering, I do enjoy looking back at the change God has wrought in my heart in the way I deal with turmoil or how I think about life. Since college, I’ve gotten married, had a baby, experienced conversion, moved cities, started and quit jobs; all of these milestones I wish I had poured my heart out about in a notebook.
My husband’s and my RCIA teacher, a young and wise Dominican priest, used the word “recollection” a lot in our process. I had never heard this word before in this context but to be recollected means to attend to the presence of God in the soul. I realized much of my urge to document my young life and feelings was a gesturing at recollection or actually attempting it in the early mornings with my big study Bible during college. As I get older, I long to live a more recollected life, to reflect on what the happy life truly is and how I can attain it through the grace of God.
So while this blog does grow out of an impulse to be more recollected and to document our little family’s life, I also want to be a more active reader and share baby pictures and Mom Thoughts. I tried to write a Serious Blog a few years ago and I burned out and experienced cringe-itis very quickly. With that, and some encouragement from the husband, it begins.
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The Romance of Thrift 