Why I am Writing this Blog

Many people write blogs for many different reasons. Here is why I am writing mine:

I've never been one to keep a journal. I've never wanted people to know what I REALLY think about a lot of things. With five brothers, four of them younger, the odds were pretty high that whatever I wrote in my journal would probably be used against me at some point in time.

I also have this other little problem. It's the fact that once you write something down, it's there, pretty much, permanently. My handwriting is not always the best (it's gotten progressively worse over the years) and if I misspelled a word or decided to change something, it looked bad. I hated having things written in ink scribbled out in my journals. (Seriously, I am NOT a perfectionist. That would be way too hard on my poor self-esteem.) With the computer has come the ability to change and fix things as necessary and nobody can tell the difference. Here, I can edit to my heart's content. Rarely do I ever leave a post alone once I hit "publish".

Okay, there is one other reason I never kept a journal when I was younger. I am way too lazy. The journal I had all through my growing up years consisted of the same basic entry, "I am cleaning my room today and I found this journal under my bed so I thought I'd better write something." accompanied by a little face doodled in the margin. Once I ran out of different silly faces to draw I lost any motivation to write again. I really honestly never thought I had anything worth writing about until I was in my 30s.

So, with the invention of computers I tried, once again, to start a journal. I wrote a little bit when I was about 34. I entitled my journal "My Life So Far - A Comedy of Errors". I had about 10 general information entries in it and was slowly adding to it when one of the kids (who shall remain nameless, but - for the record - she is the oldest) found it and made fun of my title. So I let it sit, once again, for a few more years. I've taken one post out of the old entries so far, but one of these days I might put them all in here. It takes me a while to get around to things.

Now I'm at the point in my life where stuff is starting to happen. And not always good stuff. I'm getting older and now I realize that there are stories of my kids that aren't recorded anywhere else. Things that their kids might like to know about someday. If something happens to me, there will be no other way for anyone else to know about these particular little people and their quirks and personalities. I like having a blog because I can also throw in a photo here and there and be done. I used to be big into scrapbooking until Austin was born. There are pages and pages of the girls, but not one scrapbook page at all with Austin in it. I was the kind of scrapbooker that would take hours just to do one page and that amount of time just isn't realistic any more with the way our lives are.

I like having the blog because I can post in little (or long) entries as I think of them. I can finish a story and be done. I can also go back and add to it if I want and also add photos once we get a new scanner. (It will be soon, I almost have enough money saved up. Once I add the photos in, I'll delete this sentence. That's the beauty of blogging!) I can also share this information with family who may live far away from us and want updates. Again, the laziness factor. I can type a story once and all the relatives can read it. Also, there will soon be a way to make a little book of your blog posts, so that's one less step for me. I can edit what I have, cut out some of the nonsense and then print out a copy for posterity.

I have recently become aware of some "blogging etiquette" that I am not observing. Apparently it is bad form to post more than once a day. Well, unfortunately, I have always been somewhat of a non-conformist. I blog when it is convenient or when a story hits me that I want to remember. Sundays are particularly conducive to blogging because I'm not trying to do laundry or other household chores. Also, Hal is gone pretty much all Sunday so I have some uninterrupted time to sit down and chronicle our adventures. Some people think it is breaking the sabbath, but I totally disagree. This is pretty much the only form of family history work I'm going to be doing until Austin gets into school.

And so, there you have it. I do think that pretty soon I'll run out of funny stories of the kids to blog about and I will slow down in my posting. But for now, it is a relief to get some of these stories out of my cranium to make room for new, important information. Like why Pi is called Pi. And memorizing the names of all the presidents in order. I haven't mastered that one yet.