In all seriousness I have really missed writing. For the first few months after the baby was born I simply didn't have the time or mental energy. Spoiler alert: babies are exhausting. Raising FOUR children is exhausting, for that matter. I compensated by plastering my personal Facebook profile with baby spam. Seriously, it was obnoxious. I don't feel badly for filling someone's feed with the mundane details of my day or the ten thousandth picture of my sleeping baby, because they can always hide me if they want- I might be a little embarrassed though. There just weren't a lot of options when the big kids were at school and I spent hours of every day hanging out with a baby sleeping on my lap or nursing. So while I certainly gazed at her in wonder and amazement, I also did a lot of binge watching TV and posting to social media basically anything I could pull of with one hand (and did a lot of googling of random things I was feeling paranoid about that day). Eh, I've got some friends on there who love the baby spam (particularly the grandparents), so it's cool.
Once I did feel like I could scrape together the minutes to write a little, I faced a dilemma: what do I share and what do I keep private? It's tricky business, blogging on the internet about your life and your family. I'd decided on a system to protect my kids before I started, but it had been feeling cumbersome and awkward. It was HARD to refrain from using pictures of their faces, and the nicknames never felt right because aside from Mister, I don't ever actually call them that in real life. And now that the baby is here, are the rules different for her because she's my biological child, or because her history is not as complicated as theirs?
I did not have the answers to these questions, and I began to feel like I only had two choices. Either don't overthink it, throw all the rules out the window and hope for the best! Or quit blogging. Since throwing all the rules out didn't feel right (and has never been my style), I just quit for a while.
The absence of this hobby has been nagging at me ever since. I like writing, and I like sharing pictures and stories and projects. I realized I didn't want to give it up, so I took some time and came up with new rules.
Rule #1: These rules apply equally to all of my children- it just doesn't feel right to have exceptions for the baby.
Rule #2: No names, just first initials.
Rule #3: No detailed accounts of past traumas, resulting behaviors, or case proceedings. This one means some housekeeping on my part; I'm going to have to delete some stuff. I know I know, once you've published it it's out there! I still think it's reasonable at this juncture to just delete it and not worry about it anymore.
Rule #4: Pictures are ok, but no naked baby pictures. Pictures of people not in my immediate family will only be posted with permission.
Rule #5: This blog is about me. I'm writing it for my sake, and while yes I will write stories about my family, nothing I say should be interpreted as judgement or used to judge any of them. This space is for sharing pondering musing humor and writing just for writing's sake, because I like it.
Well, that pretty much sums it up! After all that, how about some pictures to recap the last 6 months?
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| August 2014 |
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| September 2014 |
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| September 2014 |
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| October 2014 |
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| October 2014 |
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| November 2014 |
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| November 2014 |
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| December 2014 |
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| December 2014 |
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