Meredith Carson... Across the Pond and Back Again...

I had never devoted much thought to the trumpet.  It is a fine instrument, and Dizzy Gillespie was beyond words fabulous, but before tonight, I had never really had a personal experience with the trumpet. But lately my daughter Emma has been talking a lot about the trumpet.  She is a girl who knows her mind and knows exactly what she wants.  When the opportunity to join the 5th grade band presented itself, she was all over it, and she knew that the trumpet was the instrument for her. What?  Everybody plays trumpet in bed, right? Tonight Emma's Dad took her out and signed a rental agreement on a brand new, shiny, fantastic trumpet.  I looked at the final price on the agreement, and made Emma swear that she wouldn't change her mind about the trumpet next week.  She promised.  Then she took off all of the plastic and attempted to wow us with a forceful, solid blast from her new instrument.  She got there eventually, and the littlest Carso...

 My husband and I are huge fans of downtime.  Before we had children, I was a school teacher and he was some sort of chemical engineer.  We poured ourselves into our jobs during the week, and on the weekends we seriously committed ourselves to downtime.  After sleeping rather late, I used to lie in bed all day on a Saturday and read.  Occasionally I'd take a break for snacks, or to chat with my husband, or if the plot of my novel grew particularly taxing, I'd pause to take a bubble bath.  Relaxing wasn't the only thing we found lots of time for, and consequently, I found out I was pregnant after we had been married only a few months. My first pregnancy was rather complicated with preterm labor scares starting at around 20 weeks.  I spent four months of that pregnancy on strict bed rest.  There I seriously perfected the art of downtime.  I read countless books, learned to cross stitch, watched marathon episodes of my t...