The Birth of the Blog

Here's what happened: As I was reading over all of the beautiful entries in Gary's guestbook, I spied one (including an email address) by Scott Smith, and decided to write him to remind him of how cute he used to be with that backpack of his, walking all over our dear old alma mater. Remember that?

So I wrote him, and what happened to THAT original email is one stupid story I'm not even going to try and recount here...however I will say that once all the confusion died down I did get a nice email back from him, which I later answered.

Before THAT, though (before I wrote him back, I mean), my husband Robert and I took our 9 year-old daughter Madeline to her first-ever evening out with friends in a "youth center" type setting. One of the things they warned us about when we dropped her off was that, although the adults there try to keep an eye out for drinking and drug dealing, they really couldn't promise that it wasn't going on. Their control extended only so far.

"Of course, of course, of course," we said. We understood, of course. And we talked to Maddie a little before we left about what her responsibilities were while we were gone, and about what we expected of her and all that. So we were all set, right?

So we go to our movie, which was just o.k., and right about the time it was almost over, it occurs to me that those guys used the words, "drug dealing." DRUG DEALING!! Suddenly I'm seeing Madeline accepting handfuls of ecstasy from some kid with a skateboard, and I wonder what in the hell we were thinking, leaving her there.

But she was fine, of course. Shivering outside the place because she'd been drinking some sort of ice cream thing as she was waiting for us to come and get her. Cold and fine and glad to see us. It'd been a little under 2 hours, and she wanted to get home to watch her Buffy DVDs (because she has great taste, just like her mom).

So The Next Morning...

So the next morning I'm writing to my new emailpal Scott, and I think to ask him about his experience with this situation -- you know, kids and drugs (yes, yes, I see the irony, very funny you guys) and how he's handled that with his own kids. I know to ask him, see, because I've already got a great email relationship with my old pal Bill Schulte who has shared wonderful experience and given occasional advice (he strongly urged me to buy our family dog, Agatha, for instance. Which we did.) so I already know my old classmates give great advice, right?

And then I think: Why don't I just start a blog where we can all ask eachother advice on stuff...or better yet, just write about anything!

So this is it, you guys. What do you think -- should we have ourselves a little virtual reunion here, or what?

Love from Polson, Montana,

Claudia Nowicki Cunningham