C.J. Redwine

We just got the email from our adoption agency!! Here is our first picture of our precious Johanna Faith. She's 6 1/2 months old and TINY!! :) For those who've asked, we only need about $2000 more to safely travel and bring her home and we have about 5 weeks left to raise it. We're overjoyed right now!

 I haven't blogged in over a week, and I have excellent pretty good reasons for that lapse. 1. After my post on SPEAKing Out, I felt a bit raw emotionally and was too drained to really think of anything else to say for a while. 2. Even though there were some highly interesting blog-worthy things that happened last week. 3. Such as the fact that I went with my family to our neighborhood cookout, sat near a petting zoo, and watched in absolute horror as a goat kept trying to CLIMB OVER THE FENCE. 4. No doubt he heard the siren call of his Zombie Goat brethren and was attempting to join them. 5. Or he fancied the chicken sandwich on my plate. 6. Shockingly enough, he wasn't the most disturbing animal in the menagerie. 7. There was an emo llama. Which was more amusing than disturbing. 8. But worse than the Goat With Marauding Tendencies, the Emo Llama, the pig, the sheep, and the deceptively cute little bunnies, was the duck. Not actual petting zoo duck. Se

Honestly, this is a post I never dreamed I'd write. My hands are shaky, and I'm frantically thinking through all the possible consequences and ramifications of telling my story even as I type. Not consequences for me, but for my family who may not appreciate having me peel back the cover on my childhood and invite the world to take a look. But I think I need to. Because there's a book out there being called soft pornography and filth by a man who wants it yanked from high school libraries and curriculum in the name of Christianity, and I have to disagree. The book is SPEAK by Laurie Halse Anderson and it tells the story of a high school girl who is raped and chooses to remain silent about the horrible thing that has happened to her. The man objecting to the book is Dr. Wesley Scroggins, a resident of Rebulic, Missouri who published an opinion letter in the newspaper decrying several things included in the public school education in Republic. After calling the book sof

Go here for Scene One. "Do your parents know you're here?" His voice is quiet. Non-judgemental. Designed to invite my confidence and trust. Too bad I already know what lies beneath the sugar-soft syllables. I rip the corner of a Splenda packet and watch the tiny crystals slide from their paper home, arc through the air, and plummet to the bottom of my Styrofoam coffee cup. "They checked out of my day to day life a while ago." Six years, four months, and twenty-eight days ago, to be precise. Courtesy of a patch of wet highway and a faulty guardrail. Every day since then had felt heavy. Like trying to breathe underwater. "Hm," he says and takes a cup of coffee for himself. Two sugars. Three creams. "Would you sit with me for a moment? I'd like to get to know you a bit more to better understand how I can help." I wonder if he fed my sister the same line last year when she first visited this barren space carved out of the communi

I was recently interrogated interviewed by a former client over on Musings From The Slush Pile . Go check it out and leave me a comment, if you dare. Maybe you'll learn something new about me. Maybe, if you're lucky, I'll love your comment so much I'll offer to share my lemon bars with you.

1. Blogger now has a shiny new toolbar available to me while typing posts. 2. It lets me change the color of my font . 3. Make things look ridiculous fancy. 4. And any number of other fun things. I may have a new addiction. 5. Of course, this sort of thing is only new to Blogger. Word Press and Live Journal have been doing this for years. But Word Press won't acknowledge my existence and LJ has tried on any number of occasions to kill me off, so Blogger it is. 6. Speaking of blogs, I forgot something very important in my second vacation post last week. 7. You know, the one about me grabbing a huge black beetle on accident with my bare hand? 8. You'll recall that I threw the beetle onto the bed (On accident. It was an instinctive Get This Thing Out Of My Hand throw) and then called Clint to come back to the room and deal with it for me. 9. What I forgot to tell you is that I had been ironing clothes. 10. That's important to know. 11. Because the

"My name is Meaghan Callahan, and I'm an addict." The room stirs briefly as visitors sitting scatter-shot across the uneven rows of orange and silver chairs murmur greetings, offering placid acceptance of my statement as if it's an everyday occurrence to hear a sixteen year old girl admit to being one of the hungry. The lost. The broken who've managed to scrape their way up from rock bottom to cling precariously to a tiny foothold in the ranks of polite society. Maybe my admission is nothing more than a ripple across the hard-won surface of the tranquility they fight to keep. Maybe they see themselves as they look at me. Cocaine Addict, the Younger Years. A few meet my eyes, boldly identifying with the pain they think they see in mine. Offering solidarity. Brotherhood. Hope. It would be touching. If I wasn't lying through my teeth. "Why don't you tell us your story, Meaghan?" He asks, his voice softening the syllables of my name with hints o

see more Lolcats and funny pictures 1. Today, I continue the saga of my Labor Day weekend vacation. 2. You'll recall from yesterday's post that I began the weekend by revisiting my lunch the hard way all across Alabama. 3. It was an auspicious start. 4. Thankfully, once we reached our destination, the only excitement to be had came in the form of seeing family again and discovering my mother in law had the excellent foresight to bring pans of brownies with her to the hotel. 5. I can't say the same for Saturday morning. 6. As I'm a fan of personal hygiene, I took a shower. I had no difficulty turning on the water. No difficulty adjusting the direction of the water. And no difficulty pointing the little triangular arrow on the faucet right between the H and the C to achieve the perfect not-too-hot, not-too-cold water temperature. 7. All in all, I figured the shower and I had an understanding and therefore didn't hesitate to step in. 8. What I didn't know

see more Lolcats and funny pictures 1. We traveled south to Louisiana this past weekend to attend a birthday party for my hubby's 87-year-old grandmother. 2. Who still drives. 3. But who SHOULDN'T, as she amply demonstrated any number of times by driving as if other cars NEVER have the right of way. 4. But, I digress. 5. I'm still fairly brain-dead from driving all day Friday, not sleeping well (I never sleep well in hotels), and then driving all day Monday to return home only to get up before dawn Tuesday morning to take Starshine to the hospital for the surgery required to remove the titanium rods put into his arm last year when he broke it. 6. Since I'm brain-dead, it's highly likely I'll forget to blog about something truly BLOG WORTHY about this trip. 7. However, since I haven't posted in a week, that's a risk I'll have to take. 8. The trip can be divided into two categories: Stuff I Enjoyed and Stuff I Wouldn't Repeat Unless You P

I was scrounging around for a blog topic today, when VOILA! one was provided for me by a random series of morning events that ended up with me watching 1 1/2 minutes of some early morning news-type show. The commentator began the bit by describing a woman who carries a gene that makes her more likely to get breast cancer than the normal woman. The show then switched to interviewing the woman herself who said the following "I haven't had breast cancer yet. That makes me a cancer survivor." No, it doesn't. As a woman who's both battled cancer and who's been told she's three times more likely to develop breast cancer than the average woman, I have to say something to this. I don't intend to be nitpicky here. I understand the weight of carrying around a doctor's prediction that of all the people standing in a field of land mines, you're more likely to get your head blown off. That's a heavy weight to carry and it means proactively preventing