The First is Always the Worst

The trepidation that exists as you try to script your first blog post is heavy. I need to be hilarious; I need to be poignant; and by Lord I need to be concise cuz no one's going to read a rambling, stream-of-consciousness, pseudo-philosophical piece of dung about the inequities of the major BCS conferences (although that post is inevitable). See? Already a run-on sentence. Doomed. This was always the worst part of writing papers in school too. Gotta start well with your topic sentence and "grab the audience," right? Plus I have to recall my 6th grade English teacher (Mrs. Browne -- legendarily difficult teacher) who created the list of unusable throw-away words like "stuff" and "things." What she must think of text messaging now. So, screw perfection. I'm just going to simply introduce this thing (take that Mrs. Browne!).

What you are reading is designed to be the blow-by-blow of the lives of Kelly and Jason. That goes back to September 20, 1997 (or earlier but Kelly does not even remember meeting Jason the first time, so to hell with that) when we had our first kind-of, sort-of date (and that's not a veiled reference to a frat room romp; it's just that our first date movie ended with Jason falling asleep in the theater). But over a dozen years later with the imminent arrival of a baby girl, we finally have the impetus to get this off the ground. Perhaps some flashbacks in our sojourn will pop up along the way.

Anyway, the story here starts when a magical May 2009 turned around what was becoming bar-none the worst year ever. 2009 sucked at startup with our own setbacks, friends coming down with completely unfair diseases, dogs passing away well before their time. It was bad. And then we got this:


And all was forgiven. Since then we've done a decent job documenting our (but mainly Kelly's) journey through pregnancy and over time we'll try to get that up on here to share.

In the meantime, we've decided on what to name this little lady growing inside Kelly belly and with that we found the ultimate "Bennifer" or" Brangelina" name for our family. As an aside, well before Ben Affleck & Jennifer Lopez spawned this ridiculous need to combine celeb names, we had coined "AliSean" for our friends in the previous century. So, by no means are we trying to go all UsWeekly with this blog name. We invented this, Hollywood! So, seeing as our daughter shall be called Grace and since Kelly would not let me call this JasonLovesGraceKelly (what? Is Grace Kelly too outdated a reference anymore? These kids today...), we amalgamized all our names, including our favorite dog & original child, into GRAPE JELLY.
GRAce
jasPEr
Jason
kELLY

Get it? Wow, huh?

OK. Off we go.