Okay, I'm starting a blog...I think.

Let me introduce myself.  

I am an optimist, dangerously sentimental.  I love coffee, art, music, family,  friends, and most of all photography.  I believe in gratitude and have faith that the heart of life is good. 

I am VERY happily married and have three fantastic kids. 

Ruby Lauren Paterson is 5 and just started kindergarten.

Lucy Gabrielle Paterson is 3 and in preschool.

Finley Michael Paterson is 11 months and never leaves my hip.  

On my best day I am an aspiring photographer, a therapist,  a clever and self-deprecating writer and enthusiastic and adventurous wife and mother.  On my worst I am invisible.  I am a cleaner of all things that seem to stay messy and a chocolate milk fetcher to a child who seems to have a hole in her sippy cup.  I am a moody chick, but that's life.  And if I can go around telling other women to accept themselves just as they are, well I better drink a little of my own Kool-aid. 

So where does silver pennies come from?  Well, it's a magical story.  My childhood up to about age six was enchanted.  My mother was the kind of mom who took long walks with me and counted cracks in the sidewalk and dressed our cat in baby clothes for walks in the stroller.   Everything had a fairytale history.  We collected snails and let butterflies land on our arms.  We literally had a white picket fence in sunny California.  When we were going to bed each night, she would read poetry from an old green tattered book called Silver Pennies by Blanche Jennings Thompson.  It was all dusk and meadows, stars and green glass beads.  The one poem that always got my imagination going was called For a Child Named Katherine.  Fairies would come and sprinkle magic dust over her while she slept and this is where happy dreams came from.  It is out of this book of fairies, moonbeams, and dimly lit willow trees that my creative dreams were born.  

So here goes... a little bit of us every once in a while hopefully with some funny stories and maybe a few photographs too.  So grab something warm and soothing to drink and come into my ordinary world full of extraordinary characters.