I am surrounded by writers.

My mother is a Bona Fide writer -- a published poet, no less, and she journals daily, almost obsessively. My grandmother, at the ripe age of *redacted*, is also a published writer, with several essays having appeared in the newsletter of her assisted living community. My dad, an electrical engineer, is a writer of yet another sort; an eminent researcher, he has published multiple papers in his field. My older brother blogs; he likes having people argue politics with him (I gave that up years ago). My husband is an avid blog reader and commenter; he has lots of opinions about stuff that I find quite exhausting. He also writes wonderful song lyrics.

I am not a journal-keeper (at least, not since the agony of adolescence passed), I am not a writer (if you don't count writing the occasional strategic plan for work), I am not much of a navel-gazer, and I'm no longer an exhibitionist. I belong to only two chat boards and realized recently that I comment rarely. I am a listener, a reader, amongst talkers and storytellers. I'm the last person in the world I'd expect to be blogging.

So what's the story? The story is, we -- my husband, two boys, and I -- are embarking on an ambitious, scary project, and I want to document it. If anyone else finds it interesting to read about, that's cool. But mostly, I want to be able to look back on this summer and see it whole; to be able to point with pride at what we (hopefully) will accomplish, and to leave a record that my kids can tuck into their memory books to pull out and thumb over when they are grown.

No pressure.