Allow me to introduce myself.

A scatterbrain. Yup, that's me. I could blame it on being a new mum, but I've probably always been one. I've been called ditzy, flakey, a daydreamer, but I think scatterbrain is the best term for me. My focus is always scattered among many things. My brain is anything but organized, and I can rarely sustain any amount of concentration. Currently, I am in the final months of maternity leave, so my brain bounces between baby, hubby, household stuff, hobbies, pets, health, the future, the idea of going back to work and not being with my son 24/7, and so on and so on. It's pretty much non-stop.

Sometimes I'm pretty good at hiding it, but other times, not so much. My keys are always lost; my desk at work is always piled high with a variety of piles representing all the things I'm working on; my brain is always going a mile a minute, with a to do list that not only never ends, but sometimes feels like it never gets started!

The fact that my brain can't focus on anything for the long term means that I've never stuck to anything for the long term, and I've have never really found anything that I loved. As a child, I did two years of piano, clarinet, and tap & jazz.  As an adult, I tried Nordic walking and completed two half marathons. (Hmmmm, there seems to be a theme of twos here.) I tried going to the gym. I've dabbled in photography and like to scrapbook (although I prefer to call it fancy photo albums, because my "scrapbooks" are basically a bunch of pictures, some writing, and stickers.... oh, how I love stickers... but now I'm getting off track.) I've taken jewellery making, card making, and knitting classes. I've tried to learn new ways to cook. I guess I like to try new things. I never thought this was strange. Well, that is until my husband informed me about a year or so ago that I didn't have a hobby. I tried to argue, listing off all the things that I did, but he was right. I didn't really have a hobby. I kind of wanted one.

At the time, I was also going to be a mum in a few months. The pregnancy brain may have contributed to this mini-life-crisis. I felt like mums needed to have hobbies... and skills. Not practical skills like how to feed, change, or generally keep a child alive. (I knew I'd figure that all out!)  Not super-power skills. Mum skills, like cookie baking, clothing mending, crafty skills. I thought maybe I could find a hobby that would also let me learn some of these magical mum skills.  I wanted to by THAT mum - the mum who makes the best treats, can make the cool Halloween costumes, organize the best birthday party, and make summer vacation a blast! I knew I needed to get to work. (Again, pregnancy brain may have had me even more scattered and not really thinking rationally!)

And so my adventure began. I decided that I wanted to learn some new things. I was in search of not only a hobby. I needed to sort out my scatterbrain and focus.

So how did my scatterbrain lead me here? Good question. I've always toyed around with the idea of starting a blog. (And by toyed around, I mean that I've planned it out a million times in my head, trying to figure out what I would focus on, the title, etc.  Just one more subject to take up space in my brain.) It's not like I want to be famous, or have a lot of people follow me (although a few would be nice), but I do have a couple of reasons:
1) I like the idea of adding something to the "big conversation" - I'm certainly not going to add anything life changing, but maybe I could find some fellow scatterbrains like me. (Let's band together and find focus! Or just add more scattered ideas to each others minds.)
2) I'm a teacher. I often teach writing, and yet I've never really done any "real" writing. I've never taken the jump to sharing anything I've written, even though I force my students to. I'm not really confident in my writing, but I always want my students to take a risk, so it's time for me to do the same. I've been working on my writing (with my students, as they work on theirs) over the past few years and think I've picked up some tricks, so we'll see how it goes.

So, with this blog, I hope to practice my writing and step out of my comfort zone, possibly find a few more similar minded folk, and keep track of my ever-changing hobbies, in hopes of finding something that will stick. Hopefully keeping a blog is step 1 in helping me find some focus, even if only for a few hours a week.

So, here it is. I'm blogging. I'm a blogger? Well, we'll see. Maybe this will be my new hobby... Or maybe it will just be one more scatterbrained idea! Either way, it will be an adventure!