You know how sometimes you have a problem that just keeps bugging you and bugging you, then suddenly the answer falls out of the sky?

That’s how it’s been for me with this blog. As you know, I dreamed up iDivamemphis back in the dark ages of 2006 – two years is like 10 in blog years — and just loved what happened next. We’ve had great conversation, a few rousing arguments, but mostly discovered what we probably already knew: That talking to each other is the source of our greatest strength and inspiration. Then I started writing about our conversations in The CA.

Then last summer I became the editor of skirt!, a terrific new magazine for women in Memphis — click the button under the ad window to find out where to pick up your free copy — and life changed again. Got WAY busier. I had less and less time for blogging.

What to do? How to keep all of these balls in the air? (Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt this way.) So I did what I usually do with an intractable problem: I started whining about it to my girlfriends. Asking their advice. Trying out different ideas, and seeing what their reactions would be.

Finally, I have the answer, and she is the one in the totally great dress in the picture at the top of this post. Please meet Kalisa, local blogger, hilarious writer, and someone I think you’ll enjoy getting to know as she joins me blogging a few times a week. At the moment, she’s looking for an alias, you know, not because she doesn’t want you to know who she is (God knows anyone who blogs is WAY over that), but because, as she says, she sucks at thinking of that kind of stuff.

So, gentle readers, what should my terrific new blogging pal be called? And The Diva is already taken …

I miss my moms.

We came together as a group during one of those important transition moments: Our kids were leaving their safe, nurturing child care center, heading for “big school.” All working moms, we were struggling with the guilt of changing circumstances, wondering if we’d made the right decisions about the next steps for our kids.

Nine of us had kids around the same age, and we needed each other.

Click here to read the rest of my column, and then tell me what you thought — have you been in mom’s groups, or book clubs or any other kind of regular group that’s lasted a long time? What are your secrets? Why did it last?

I can’t quite believe it, but it’s been two years today that I launched iDivamemphis and the conversation that just keeps getting better with women in the Greater Memphis area (and beyond). You know, so much happens online — and in life — that I think blog years are kind of like dog years: One really equals seven, or something like that. (In the pix, the wonderful champagne flutes that my girlfriends gave me at the party launching this endeavor. I’ll never be able to say how much their support meant/still means to me.)

You might remember that my goal was to start another way for us to talk to each other, since the conversations I have with my girlfriends are what gets me through the day (and sometimes the night, too). And of course there are plenty of other wonderful girl/mom/diva blogs; I’m always collecting new ones. If you haven’t ever been to Dining with Monkeys, Sassymolassy, Secret Agent Mom and the mother of ‘em all, Dooce (she grew up in Bartlett!), go! Soon! Then tell me: What other girl/mom/diva blogs should I check out?

And thanks for two very good years.

It’s been nearly two weeks, and I’m still in mourning for the photos that were inside the (crummy, old) digital camera that was lost … click HERE to read more in my column this morning. Even though I now have a snazzy new camera, and can print those photos right here at home (thanks, honey), I’m still so sad about the memories I’ve lost. Fortunately, I can keep making new ones. But still ….

I start with the best of intentions, scooping up red and pink cards weeks in advance of Valentine’s Day. But this year, somehow, I didn’t send a one.

So I’m feeling regretful this morning … there’s never a bad time to tell the people you love that you love them, and why, and I kind of feel as though I’ve missed my chance. (The lotus blossoms the monk is preparing to offer to Buddha in the photo seemed like an appropriate “card.”) So here goes … though there are way more Loves in my life than I could ever fit on one list.

Join me: Who do you love, and why? Read the rest of this entry »