Okay, so I haven’t been keeping up with the world. I realize that I haven’t been cool for some time now.

I’m not really sure how I got so far behind. All I can say is this: be careful, because if you step away from the popular culture momentarily so you can raise three kids and feed a golden retriever twice a day and try to keep your checkbook balanced and the geraniums watered, one day you look up and people are taking photographs with their freaking telephones and wondering why you aren’t writing about your personal life on the Internet. I was a little surprised to realize this was something people did.

I am happy to talk about my personal life to almost anyone–not because I imagine it’s the most interesting life anybody ever heard about–but just because I was raised in the South, where telling stories was almost a sporting event. In my family we didn’t go on elaborate vacations or excel at touch football in the front yard. We talked. I have an old tape recording of my mom talking with her best friend, just one of those leisurely conversations between friends–and it’s the most remarkable thing: both of them are talking a mile a minute at the very same time, without pausing for breath or even listening to what the other one is saying. That’s the kind of stock I come from.

For years I wrote a column about my family life for the New Haven Register, which was eventually picked up by Working Mother magazine, where it ran for ten years. That was when I discovered the startling fact that family life is actually funny. Before I started writing these things down, I didn’t know it was amusing when my two-year-old fell to the floor in a fit because I refused to pour out the soy sauce and give her orange juice in the soy sauce bottle, or when I had to outfit a dozen wooden clothespins in authentic Renaissance costumes in the two hours between dinner and bedtime. Washing machine overflows all over the kitchen floor, and the babysitter quits on the spot? All three kids come down with chicken pox three days apart? Lock my keys in the car five times in one day? All good column material!

And so here I am, joining the 21st century with a blog. Soon I’ll be taking pictures with the phone.