May 30, 2009

Back to our Blogging Roots

When Caleb first entered our lives, we blogged about everything he did: when he first rolled over, his first church service, his first babysitter, his first words, his cute little talents, and of course, his infamous baby dedication where he pooped on the preacher:

Caleb with our former pastor in August 2003. Look out Brother Al!

Then somewhere along the line I realized that lots of people have (or have had) little babies, and everybody’s baby does funny things, and everybody thinks their baby is the smartest and cutest.

Then for some reason, people started reading my blog…people I didn’t even know…people who had never met me or my children.

Then I read that to have a good blog you had to write about stuff your audience wants to hear about. Since I’m a web professional, and a big chunk of my audience seems to be web designers and developers, then I thought that maybe I should write about that. I was told that this would establish me as an expert in my field and bring in more career opportunities. So, I wrote a few articles here and there about web design and recent projects I’d been working on.

Then I didn’t feel like writing. I love my work, but after doing this kind of thing all day and even at night on freelance projects, the last thing I wanted to do was to spend more time writing about it. Consequently, today I’ve almost stopped blogging.

Then Twitter came along. I’ve heard others talk about how Twitter killed the blog. Perhaps there is some truth to that. The stories I used to expand into a couple paragraphs for a quick post are now crammed into 140 characters or less. So, I blog less and Twitter more.

Then when you go a while without blogging, you feel like the next post you do has to be something really, really good. So I’d have an idea of something to write about, but I usually felt that it wasn’t big enough or original enough.

Then, finally, I realized that this is not everyone else’s web site. It is mine. And I want more articles about funny stuff my kids do. Not so much for you, though I hope you don’t unsubscribe, but for us. Sometimes I go back through the archives of stories we wrote about Caleb, and just smile and laugh. I don’t care if anyone else ever reads it. It’s a way for me to remember the little things…

...the little things that I don’t remember about Andrew. He’s almost a year and a half now, and I have so little memory of the funny little things he does all the time. The reason is because I stopped writing about it. Oh, I may have briefly Twittered stuff here and there, but it’s not easy wading way back in time through your Twitter archives to find a post you wrote about your baby’s birth. And with Twitter, I don’t get the rich details that allow me enter into that memory and relive it.

I’ll still write occasional web related articles, but Tiffany and I also want to go back and blog more about our family life, the way we used to. I hope you’ll understand and want to keep reading what we write, but if not, that’s cool too. I understand. Personally, most of my blog subscriptions are about web design. I don’t subscribe to any other mommy/daddy blogs myself. That’s because my kids are the cutest, smartest, and funniest :)

Caleb

Andrew