happy birthday blog!!

on august 30, 2009

my blog was born.

well, the first post at least.  i was sitting around the edges of our family room with my sisters for much longer than a day during the actual creation and naming process.

in honor of paisley's first birthday, i'll share the incident that created her name.

it all started with hailey.  we read aloud to each other often, all different sorts of books.

we were in the middle of the eragon series (which i'm sad to say, i'm not a fan anymore).

it was the height of tension: a man tied to a stone slab and about to be sacrificed to evil beasts.

and then suddenly,

"he was stricken with paisley!

palsy, actually.  he was stricken with a palsy.  but hailey didn't say that.  she clearly (and intensely) read

"paisley."

and that was the beginning.

we laughed so hard we cried and our sides ached.

the mental image of huge patterned paisley-shaped somethings shooting from the rocks around the poor almost-sacrificed man was too much to bear.

the phrase sat patiently on a sticky note (attached to a magnet board) for almost a year before it became the monument of my record keeping and a constant reminder of sisterly affection {not to mention the persistent reminder of the good laughing at a silly mistake can make}.

the phrase evolved, with time.  it's become a symbol of what life (especially in college) can do to people.

all those bright colors spinning around you, so many and so close that you can barely make sense of it.

but when you back up,

you begin to see that it isn't really chaos at all.

it's a pattern.

unique

brilliant

all your own.

and then you realize your pattern isn't the only one.

sometimes it weaves in and out, through others.  mixing colors, picking up polka dots or stripes.

and that's just the beginning of seeing the real big pattern.

because after all, 

we're all stricken with paisley together here, aren't we?