I started this blog with the idea of sharing it at some point, but have never done so, and as you can see the posts are infrequent. It's too easy to think about the here and now, or if I talk about our life, pre 112207, to get bogged down in comparisons - the then and now. Nick's birthday is coming up, and that gave me the idea of trying to do a sort of cycle through the year - the now always brings back the then anyway.
Three years ago we put the photo below in Nick's high school yearbook. It was a sort of compromise. We wanted to buy an ad, Nick didn't want anything that would embarrass him, so this is what we did. No name.
The text is Rudyard Kipling's "If." Nick liked Kipling, at least as much as he had read of him. The Disney adaptation of The Jungle Book was his favorite movie for a very long time, and we read Kim as a chapter book when he was little. He knew some of Kipling's verse, including this poem, but "If" was our pick for him, rather than his own. Nick was on the way.
