Hello!

A few weeks ago I suggested to a friend we should build a blog sure to get us some notoriety: Suburban moms having a secret affair. With each other.

There would be Bisphenol-A-free sippy cup talk and illicit sex, exactly what men and women look for on the Internet, where it's all mommy madness and porn.

"I am so not a soccer mom. I wouldn't even know how to pretend I was,'' my friend, a working mother in a big metropolis, wrote back.

"Yeah, and we've never so much as kissed each other,'' I thought, sending her the "You know, I'm only kidding'' note.

Kind of.

We both already had imagined the ad sales, the scandal at being found out, the book deal. I had not imagined how I would explain it all to my mother.

After the brief fantasy, my friend went back to her daily deadlines (she's a newspaper reporter) and I counted my blessings for the people who read my real blog, Bilingual in the Boonies, and don't make me feel I need to be snarky or sleazy to merit a visit.

Hello Parenting.com. Happy to be here being me. My name is Carrie. I am a Cuban-American living far from the Mother Country that is Miami. My roots now reach deeply into the country soil of a little town outside of Nashville, the lovely city where I once was a daily newspaper reporter. In nearly two decades as a journalist, I wrote about everything from fires to flip flop fashion to freaks.

I often tell people it is easier to cover an airplane crash on deadline than parent a preschooler. Mine anyway -- a funny and ferocious 4-year-old named Maria who has done her best, even before she was born, to do me in -- infertility treatment, 37-hour labor, emergency C-section. All followed by bad latch, eight months of exclusive pumping, hellacious teething, champion whining, and a Year Three that left me feeling each evening like I'd been chewed and shaken by a Terrier puppy.

Of course, not a day goes by when I don't thank the saints and gods for her, our only child. She is, just like yours I am sure, precious and poetic.

"Mami, when you hold a baby guinea, you hold it like you're holding a miracle,'' she said a couple of weeks ago when we picked up a batch of young guineas. (Guineas = non-chemical tick-fighting warriors.)

In between the raising and the writing, I market and sell a line of Spanish children's gift t-shirts, Los Pollitos Dicen (The Little Chicks Say), which I co-founded in 2005 with a genius Cuban-American friend. Oh, and I do a little PR because it melds my journalism background with the small business knowledge I've gained in the last three years of marketing the Pollitos.

The guilt that would consume me -- and my family would harass me -- if I didn't focus on teaching Maria to speak Spanish is part of the reason I created Bilingual in the Boonies. It is where we share tips, products, and stories that inspire bilingualism and explore life "on the hyphen'' as a popular Cuban writer described la vida for those of us who are "Cuban-American,'' or really, anything hyphenated-American. We are a little of this, a little of that, the ever-changing flavor of America.

Some people trip onto the Boonie Blog because I have an entire section devoted to "Dulce de Leche,'' -- an addictive Spanish caramel used in everything from ice cream to cookies. Others find the site looking for how to say moose in Spanish (I kid not) and pictures of J.Lo's behind. (Of course.)

But, that's about as steamy as it gets at the Boonie Blog.

Let's see how we can fog up the windows over here.

Sans sleaze.

Visit Bilingual in the Boonies and
Los Pollitos Dicen