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Janet is ainm dom. And as you might have guessed, I dabble in learning the Irish language… and “dabble” is a very good word for it. Although I’ve been enrolled in, and showing up for, a weekly Irish class at the Irish American Heritage Center (IAHC) in Chicago for longer than I’m willing to admit, I have absorbed very little. It seems my adult brain thought it was finished with all that language-learning stuff many years ago and has become a bit thick in that department. However, my reason for studying Irish was not so much to become a speaker, though that would be wonderful, as to become familiar with the beautiful native language of a country I love and hope to live in one day. I have accomplished that much at least, so whatever more I learn will be icing on the cake!

I live a few miles, and a lot of minutes due to traffic, to the West of Chicago. I am married to a Dub, that’s a person born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. He has only been a resident of the U.S. since about January of 2004, when his long awaited VISA and subsequent Green Card arrived. Dub that he is, a cottage in West County Clare is nearly as strange and startling to him as it is to me!

My pride and joy are my three children. I say ‘children’ for the lack of a better word though two of them are adults. My middle child is my daughter, Kate, a 27-year-old BFA graduate from The Theatre School at DePaul University, who moved to L.A. after college to pursue a career in acting. Kate is surrounded by bookend brothers, Anton and Eoin (pronounced “Owen”, it’s Old Irish for John). Anton and Eoin are 20 years apart with Eoin 12 and Anton, well you do the math!… in the words of Craig Ferguson, “I KNOW!!” Anton my 6’7″ son, has a degree in English Lit. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is now working as a Sales Manager in the hospitality field and has recently taken a job relocation to beautiful Portland, Oregon while also Administrator of a non-profit organization he created. Eoin is now in 7th Grade Middle School, is a weather-nerd, loves P.E., Computer Lit. and Social Studies but has no love for homework! Eoin is also my lucky dual citizenship child, who not only has an Irish father, but was born in Dublin (I lived there for a year during 2001-2002). All three of my children have at least one dimple (Anton has two!), all three are people I would want as friends if I wasn’t lucky enough to be their mother.

Mostly I have been a stay-at-home, full-time mom. Considering the vast space between my children, that’s a lot of years of mom-dom! Although I’ve done very little with it, I did study design at Northern Illinois University, back in the days of T-squares and triangles. I also trained and worked in the field of Desktop Publishing. Both of these things make me extra embarrassed of the archaic beginning of this blog… I have just enough knowledge to be quite aware of how much I do not know! I am currently the Social Media Coordinator for a non-profit organization… see above 🙂

Other than my family, my love of Ireland, Irish traditional music and the language, my interests and passions revolve around books, coffee shops and politics. I am a Liberal Democrat who loves a great political debate. Well, loves is probably an overstatement. It would be more accurate to say, I just can’t seem to stay out of a great political debate!

On November 24, 2009, my husband and I purchased a little cottage in County Clare, Ireland and I find the whole thing to be so exciting and interesting that I thought maybe others would feel the same. And thus was born this little blog. I hope I learn my way around this site enough to make a go of it. Please be patient with me, and please, feel free to comment!

*This page is in great need of an update, which I will do sometime soon! We moved permanently to our home in the bog in September of 2016! A lot has changed.

Unless otherwise noted, photos on Blogging from the Bog belong to me.