Monday, May 04, 2015

Ten Years.

On April 30, 2005, I posted for the first time. It is now May 4, 2015. Those children who were 3 and 5 are now 13 and 15.

I haven't looked back through the archives in a long time, and I started today and Emma and I laughed and laughed and laughed. I'm so glad I took the time to blog! I'm so grateful I wrote down the things I thought I'd never forget. 

Because I did. I forgot. I forgot what a funny  little fairy child Emma was, and how Bo used to talk and talk and talk and never stop talking. Even though so many of my posts were about how bad I felt and how tired I was and how busy we were, I still get a sense of my own happiness in re-reading them. With my 20/20 hindsight, I see that writing was a big part of that.

The best thing about this blog is that I documented a few little stories about our days.  I stopped documenting all the funny/cute/silly things my kids said as soon as I realized that they could read them. It wasn't their story I was worried about telling, the problem was that I was, in fact, telling MY story and that they might not be able to claim their stories as their own. I was telling my version of their childhood.

I pretty much talked about scrapbooking, the church and the kids. And when 2 out of 3 were gone from my life, and it wasn't fair to expose my kids to vicious schoolmates reading about their adolescent struggles, the complaining about my daily life just couldn't hold up. It's taken me some years to process why I felt so reluctant to blog about them in later years, and why the well seemed to dry up. I want to blog about my kids. I'm crazy about them and they occupy most of my time/thought/energy still. But their story is their story. So I found myself without a story to tell - at least, one that I felt was worth sharing.

The good news is that I'm finding one. The bad news is that I've done so much reading that now I can't bear to share it without doing a crap-load more reading, so it might be a minute before things pick up around here.

With this post, I'm building a little altar. I'm taking time to say I'm grateful for the writing that I've done, and I'm grateful for the writing that is to come. I'm grateful for what I've learned, how I've grown, who I've loved, and for you who walked a ways with me when our paths crossed.

Earth truly is crammed with heaven.