Welcome! Sit Down! Pour Yourself a Cup!

Please, allow us to introduce ourselves. 

First there's Julia. She sadly has to go to work daily and leave her tiny munchkin (AKA Shiny) at daycare. Julia has one husband, who has decided that his name will be Brain Trust. Yes, she did have to look up what a Brain Trust was. Since he's the smartest person she knows within a 30-mile vicinity, for the intents and purposes of the blog it will be shortened to The Brain. Julia would like to spend more time with Shiny and The Brain, especially since her work puts her in close proximity to several crazy homeless men who tell her that she smells like Vanilla Lollipops. When she isn't working and writing, Julia likes to ballroom dance, drink copious amounts of tea, and play video games until she realizes Shiny is screaming at the top of her lungs and The Brain is bellowing for more chicken-and-broccoli and Odie & Garfield (the dog and cat) are running in circles around the living room. You know what the one upside to work is? It's deliciously silent...

Jayne is a twenty-something freckled contradiction in terms. Confident, highly opinionated and consistently over-scheduled, she often changes her mind, prefers to be alone, and struggles with insecurity. She loves stilettos but is often bare-foot, lives in dresses but spends way too much money on “just the right pair of jeans,” and loves watching football and reading sci-fi/fantasy but prefers to be known as a princess rather than a tom-boy. She’s obsessed with red wine and coffee, but is almost as likely to be seen drinking strong dark British tea or a glass of Muscato. She adores the ocean and quiet wild places, but lives in a thirteen-story high-rise in one of the busiest cities on the East Coast.  She married Jim-dear three years ago, and he is the Immovable Object to her Unstoppable Force.  Tall, dark, handsome, and oddly serene for a Latino, Jim-dear handles with humor and grace every ounce of Irish temper and wild joy Jayne manages to throw at him. Usually. The perfect depiction of their relationship lies somewhere between Ricky and Lucy Ricardo and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Jayne’s  life has been completely turned inside out since Noodle was born three months ago and she decided to stay home with him.  No more crazy career, no more business trips across the country, but suddenly more moms’ groups and laundry than she ever believed possible.  Per usual, she doesn’t really have a plan or any idea how she is going to tackle this new turn in her life, but she’s prepared to face it with an ample amount of laughter, questions, tears, therapy-baking, and prayers. And coffee, lots of coffee.

Evelyn is a complex woman of a bit too much sarcastic wit, rather enough student loans, and many hobbies.  As a famous, somewhat fictional Spaniard once said, "Let me 'splain.  No, there is too much.  Let me sum up."  On her name badge at work, her three interests as listed are: theatre, literature, and developing superpowers.  The name badge in question lives on the wall next to her desk which currently houses a PC and two monitors, an iMac, two keyboards, two mice, an iPad, an iPod, an Android tablet, a tape dispenser, a notepad, a book, a pencil cup, two water bottles, and an eraser shaped like toast, which is her favorite food.  Her other home is a “one bedroom” apartment, which is the fourth consecutive domicile she has inhabited in which her boudoir was sans door for one reason or another (hence the scare quotes.)  In this case, having no bedroom door means no obstacles in the way of cross-apartment dance-with-no-pants-fest (which is not meant as a euphemism) so she doesn't mind.  She doesn't have any husbands or childrens to trip over in her dancing at the moment, making her the “single and fabulous” quadrant of the group, if not the slightly more “mentally hilarious” one.  But since she lives and works in the City of Subdued Excitement, she tries to keep it down.

Kate is a not-so-newlywed living in the Northwest with her husband, several spiders, and mosquitoes who could carry away a small moose. She's a senior editor at a small publishing house, and spends her days drinking endless cups of tea and scrawling red-inked notes in the margins of manuscripts. And once a month or so she gets to throw on her strappy heels and fly all over the country to have important meetings and sit on panels and pretend she’s much more important than she is. But when work is over she comes home and passes the evening cooking up soups and cobblers and begging the hubby to please have another helping so it doesn't go to waste. She loves to hike and camp (as long as someone brings marshmallows) and has good intentions of becoming a runner, but when the rainy season lasts eight months and you hate running on a treadmill ... well, isn't it just easier to stay inside and experiment with rhubarb? Isn't it?

So that's us: four women in four different places and four different stages in life who love to write and are figuring out what it means to be a woman in the twenty-first century. This is our place to write about dating, motherhood, marriage, kitchen catastrophes, and all the things we never anticipated about being grown-up. We'll post recipes and pictures and we'll tell stories. We'll discuss the woes of laundry and the joys of farmers' markets and the perils of family holiday gatherings. We'll talk about books and music and religion and science and art that moves us beyond ourselves. And we'll laugh a lot, because, as the inimitable Audrey Hepburn said, "Laughing is the best calorie burner." (She went on to say that she "believes in kissing, kissing a lot." So do we.) 

Since we can't gather for a weekly luncheon at a charming tea shop with cushy blue throw pillows strewn artfully about the place, we'll meet here instead. We hope you'll join us.

Welcome.