So, Why A Piece of Blue Chalk?

Now and Forever!
Hello, I'm known as Bird, and I'm Daughter #1. I'm adding this post to provide a reference and explanation for the name of our blog. The title A Piece of Blue Chalk, comes from the ending of G.K. Chesterton's essay, A Sermon on Cheapness. The selection is as follows:

"My bosom friend the Pessimist and I were standing outside a small toy shop, glueing our noses to the glass, when the long silence was broken by my remarking on the beauty of a solid stick of blue chalk, which was offered for sale (in some tempest of generosity) for a halfpenny. `Have you considered,' I asked, `all that this stick of blue chalk means? For a halfpenny I am possessed of it. I go home at night under the stars, between dark walls and through mazy streets. I shall be free to write upon those walls beautiful or stern sentiments, arraigning the powers of the earth, and write them in the very colour of heaven. At home I may beguile the evening in a thousand innocent sports, designing barbaric patterns upon the new table-cloth, drawing dreamy and ideal landscapes upon the note-paper, decorating my own person in the manner of our British predecessors, sketching strange and ideal adventures for strange and ideal characters. And all this blue river of dreams is loosened by a halfpenny.'

The Pessimist replied, in his sad, stern way, `Drivel. It is only
the blue chalk you buy for a halfpenny. You do not buy the stars
for a halfpenny; you do not buy the streets for a halfpenny;
you do not buy your dreams or your love of drawing or your tastes
and imaginations for a halfpenny.'

`True,' I replied. `The stars and the dreams and myself are cheaper
than chalk: for I bought them for nothing.'

He burst into tears and became immediately convinced of the basis
of true religion. For our very word for God means Economy:
is not improvidence the opposite of Providence?"