To Blog or Not to Blog

I decided to blog. All the cool kids are doing it. By that I mean my brother, my brother in law, two missionaries in Norway, and a pastor in the exciting town of Farmington, Minnesota. It occurs to me that this would have been a perfect medium for my baby updates...too late, I'm afraid. I wonder if I'll have anything more interesting to say, but I'm sure I'll come up with something, and whether it's interesting or not...well, that's up to the readers to decide (who will probably include my brother and, well, none of the other cool kids).

I guess you could say the turkeys put me over the edge into blogger-dom. The turkeys and the grasshoppers. My 10 month old son and I take a 2 mile walk every school day, and one day we were walking later in the day than we normally do and I noticed hundreds of grasshoppers, jumping around us. We're talking freeing the Israelites from Egypt frequency of grasshoppers. It was as if they were escorting us, because they were jumping and flitting about in front of and behind us, but only about 8 feet in front. It was kind of like a parade, as we passed, the hoppers would hop. This went on for about 1/4 of a mile, and I found it odd that none of the hoppers hit us. On our way back through the area I couldn't keep the suckers off of me, leading me to believe that the hoppers wanted to keep me out.

The turkeys were on a different day, same route. As Caleb and I came walking down the hill on Bluebird Drive, we flushed a family of turkeys out of the field to the right of the road. There was a mama turkey, four medium-sized turkeys, and three baby turkeys, still with fuzzy downy feathers (I hadn't realized that turkeys had more than one brood per season, but now we know). And they ran down the road in front of us. After a while they stopped running and walked, but they kept looking back at us, keeping an eye on us to make sure we weren't a threat. Every now and then the leader would start running again and all the others would join in. As they reached the corner, a second mama sized turkey flew from behind us up the road to join the crew. Now the family was divided. The first mama headed into the woods on the west side of the road, but the second mama wanted to head for the grassy field on the east side of the road. It was interesting following these birds. I could almost see them thinking, wondering if Caleb and I could be trusted.

So, how did these two experiences lead to this blog? Well, I realized that I wanted to share my experiences with someone, anyone, really, but I didn't want to impose a burden upon my friends and family by having these two stories show up in their inboxes. With a blog, they can decide when, or if, they want to be burdened with my random thoughts and experiences. Perfect.