Glad Hands

Here is Margot demonstrating her clapping capabilities. Only 9 months old and already on the road to being a rhythm genius. Add that to her sweet dance moves and we might have to spring for some hip hop classes sooner than we thought... or maybe MKD can just come down here and give them a tutorial...? 

Corn bread and pinto beans for dinner tonight on this chilly Sunday. Can't get much more southern than that.. I refuse to prepare collards.. ick. Turnip greens yes.. chard absolutely.. collards.. just not a fan. 

The other weekend when I was filling out Mother's Day cards.. I couldn't help but start thinking about my handwriting - which is pretty atrocious by the way. When I was in HS I worked as a pharmacy tech (at that point in my life I was planning to attend pharmacy school) and I used to joke that I should be getting my MD instead of my PharmD since I already had the handwriting thing down. Ha. The proverbial "they" say that a person's handwriting says a lot about who they are as a person. I have long wondered what mine said about me. 

When I was in elementary school, I learned a couple of different styles of penmanship - whose titles elude me at the moment. I remember hating the way they looked. Everything had a little tail on it. This was supposed to make it more natural to transition to cursive. It did and I did a year or so later but I still didn't feel like my handwriting came naturally. It felt forced. Soon I started hanging out with a neighborhood girl I thought was super cool and her mother had a very stylized way of writing. She made her a's look like typed a's.. sorta like this ---> a 

I started trying to write like she did. It took me forever but I told myself I was just being normal. I continued to try to write this way for awhile (not in my school work of course where I was supposed to use cursive) and eventually gave it up because it was too hard and sort of embarrassing to be so obviously copying someone else's handwriting while attempting to pass it off as your own. I continued with my sloppy sub-par cursive for awhile and also went through several other phases and varying styles of printing. Nothing really stuck. In HS, out of necessity, I just went with my handwriting the way it was. I didn't have time to think about how it looked or what it said about me while I was struggling to keep up with all the note taking in my AP classes. I did, however, re-copy notes if people wanted to borrow them because I was the only one who could really read them. This continued right on into college.. I mean do you know how embarrassing it is to be a girl and have terrible handwriting? Especially since I am almost compulsively neat in every other aspect of daily life. Anyway, I finally just gave up trying to have neat handwriting, or even distinctive handwriting around the time I met Stephen. It just was what it was, a sort of printing/cursive blend that I am completely unable to to keep in a straight line across an unlined page. Once we moved up north I really felt like I took true ownership of my scrawl. I still recopied my own post-it notes occasionally but I was ok with that.. still am actually. As I wrote out my greetings to the mothers in my life, I was pleased to see the letters being formed on the page had a regular pattern and each "g" had the same sort of tail. It's nothing close to textbook and it's not even very original but it's mine and I am pleased with it's representation of my thoughts. I suppose I have settled into my self at last.