About five weeks ago, I wrote a piece explaining my family's personal stake in the passage of Health Care Reform. Needless to say, I was overjoyed when the Senate bill passed in the House that weekend and then the Reconciliation pakage passed the Senate a few days  later.

More good news followed. Anna was accepted by Oregon Healthy Kids at the beginning of April. She is now covered and we've scheduled both her four-year checkup and her first dental exam. Unfortunately, our income disqualified Julia and I from the Oregon Health Plan. Now we had two options: either Julia would gain permanent employment with benefits or we would be able to apply for high risk insurance through the Department of Health and Human Services in July—six months after we lost our previous coverage.

Then came the third bit of good news. Julia was hired to a permanent position with excellent benefits. We had up to thirty days to decide on a package, but the coverage was retroactive to her first day of employment. Our three and a half month journey through the insurance wilderness was over.

I will never forget that journey, and I won't forget the thirty plus million Americans still wandering in the wilderness.

I learned a valuable lesson from my last blog—the one I ran from 2003 to 2006. I call this lesson The Dilemma of Blogging:

1. When you are busy, you will have lots to write about but no time to write.
2. When you aren't busy, you will have plenty of time but nothing to say.

When I started my first blog—the one I kept up from 2003 to 2006—I posted daily. Sometimes long pieces about the preparations for our wedding or my compositional career, other times little observations about whatever struck me. No matter how important or trivial, I posted something everyday.

Then Anna was born and I found myself way too busy taking care of an infant to write anything. My posts became less frequent, most often they were simply photos of Anna, and by her first birthday my blog had gone the way of so many others. 

As T.S. Elliot wrote in The Hollow Men "not with a bang but a whimper."

So given the month-long hiatus I am ending today, you can gather that I've been busy. First came Holy Week. I'm in a new church so I wanted to make the most of the most important week in the Liturgical Year. Then my wife Julia picked up eight hours of overtime the following week—it was still a temp position at that point so she worked all the hours they would give her. Then came Julia's birthday, Anna's first dance class, and finally just as Julia's temp contract was set to expire, she received an offer of permanent employment from the same company she had been temping for.

All in all, it's been a good month, but a busy one, and on top of everything I've been struggling through writer's block.

So what to do? Obvious answer—write.

First, I need to scale back my goal for the blog just a bit for now. One piece a week to start. I have a few topics jotted down in my notebook. I will pick one and write an entry before the end of this week. Then next week, another topic, another entry, and so on.

Second, if possible get back to the chapter a week goal for my manuscript. It may be too ambitious a goal but I have to keep trying.

Third, I need to get my writing out there. I've signed up for an account at Street Prophets, a Daily Kos community focusing on faith and politics. This week, I will write my first diary and cross-post it here. I am also going to get off my butt—finally—and start participating in online forums related to Cleft Lip and Palate and Apraxia of Speech. Finally, I am enrolling in a writing class with the goal of getting at least one paid article in print by the end of the year.

I've been writing for one year now, and given that a year ago I had no idea if I'd be able to write a book, the fact that I have 290 pages and over 57,000 words of a first draft means that I can do this as long as I'm serious about it and stick to it.