Hello and welcome to my blog!

I have been thinking about starting a blog for some time now and have decided that maternity leave is the perfect time to do so.  Can you tell that I haven’t yet had the baby, thereby thinking I am going to have lots of time to do some blogging?!  

Writing is not something that I naturally itch to do—some people have a need to write, but that is not me.  Instead, I am the type of person who will read something and then have discussions in my head all day long about the topic.  It is these thoughts swimming around in my head that just can’t be contained any longer.  And, after a month of leave from work where the majority of human interaction I get has been with my husband Jon, I think maybe it will do both of us good for me to have another outlet for my ramblings.  So I decided to share those internal discussions with the world--possibly more for my benefit than yours, but we’ll see as this little experiment goes along!  

I read a variety of types of blogs and have not yet really narrowed down what kind of topics I want to cover, so this will definitely be a bit of an eclectic mix, at least at the start.  We’ll see if I find some focus somewhere along the way.  Mainly this will cover my new and exciting mommy-ventures from a Catholic and/or feminist point of view (one day I’ll write about how I fit the two together, but I have to build up some courage for that first!), hopefully with a bit of food (baked goods are my weakness) and pregnancy/birth health thoughts (I am a health researcher by training and becoming a bit of a birth junkie) thrown in for fun.

About the blog title: not very exciting story, actually.  This is the name of a song that we occasionally sing in church.  While I quite like the melody, I think the words are kind of silly, as they include the phrase "and the trees in the fields will clap their hands", multiple times.  Firstly, fields tend not to have huge numbers of trees, and secondly, I just always thinks of Ents clapping, as trees don't typically have hands.  However, joy is one of my all-time favorite words.  I think of it as almost onomatopoeic: just the sound of the word makes you feel joyful.  So anyway, this phrase really speaks to me because that is what I try to do, both in my life and, hopefully, with this blog: spread joy in the world. 

Thanks for joining me--let's see where we go!