A Most Auspicious Beginning

(Can you believe this photo exists?)

Welcome to my brand new blog! This is rather a chaotic point in time in which to begin a blog, with lots of crazy stuff going on, but as I tried to wait for The Right Time to Start Blogging I recalled an exchange in a short play I wrote called “American Super Wok”. The female character is meeting with a guy she hardly knows in an out-of-the-way Chinese restaurant to discuss the fact that she is expecting his child.

He: If you wait for the right time, the right place—

She: The right person—

He: —the right circumstances for it to ‘make sense’—

She: —for it to not be completely stupid and insane—

He: —until you have enough money, steady work, a good place to live—

She: —a sense of personal identity, a path in life, security, stability—

He: —a plan—

She: A plan?

He: If you wait for all that, well, you may as well give it up. You’ll never do it. Sometimes the baby to have is—

She: —the one you’re already pregnant with.

He: Right.

So. In that vein, sometimes the blog to start is the one you’re already pregnant with. So! Welcome to this birth of this blog. Not the perfect start, but it’s a start. Ahem. A Most Auspicious Start, in fact. Cough. And here we are.

To get you up to speed: right now there are six days left in my Kickstarter campaign to raise $9,750 for airfare to get myself, my partner Andrew Giles Buckley, our two children and our crew members Jay Sheehan and Clayton Harper to South America to shoot the second adventure in my web series Through My Eyes. We’ve got $7, 799, with $1,951 left to raise before the deadline on March 12. If we don’t meet our goal, we get nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Goose egg.

Take a look, please, at the Kickstarter promotional video at http://www.avaandsofie.com/, and watch all 13 episodes of the first Through My Eyes adventure, China: Through My Eyes, at WGBH.org/kids. It’s a child’s eye travel documentary following Ava and Sofie, ages seven and eight, as they explore three cities in China’s Pearl River Delta and share their adventure with everybody back home, from elementary school students to teachers, parents, homeschoolers, and adventurers of all ages and walks of life.

We leave for South America on March 18. That’s about a week and a half away. A week from Sunday! We'll fly from Boston to Buenos Aires and travel south to Ushuaia, Argentina, where we will depart on a Cruceros Australis cruise ship to round Cape Horn, rubbing shoulders with penguins, elephant seals and glaciers along the way and following in the historic watery footsteps of explorer Ferdinand Magellan and naturalist Charles Darwin. Then we will land in Punta Arenas and travel to Santiago, Chile before heading back home to Boston. What an adventure!

To make it more exciting — because it needs to be even more exciting, right? — I had a thyroid biopsy today, and will be waiting nearly a month for the results as we travel 6,752 miles away, around Cape Horn and back. It’s good to keep busy, right? I hope to blog along the way, sharing impressions and photos as we go. I think it’s going to be pretty wonderful.

Welcome aboard the — uh — newborn ship “Jennifer Sexton’s Blog”. You may lose some sleep, and you may get a bit seasick, but that’s what newborn ships and mixed metaphors are all about. So put that in your pipe and see who salutes!

I remain,

Jen