Farewell, Blog

Over the past year or so, I've been feeling more and more like it is time for me to close out this blog. One big reason for this is that I'm working now, and that means a) I am writing more in other ways and find I have less of that need to empty out what's in my brain (even though I'm doing science writing, not anything personal) and b) I have less time total, as well as less free time that I can/want to use sitting at the computer concentrating and writing, seeing that this is a good description of my job. Another big reason is that as our kids get bigger, I feel differently about writing about their lives. When they were tiny babies, sharing about my life with them felt natural; now, I am more aware of their ownership of their own stories, and how the job of telling their stories belongs to them and not to me. I think it's possible to write about my experience of life, including parenting, in a respectful, appropriate way but it feels time to call this blog finished. I started writing this blog right when Grace was born and Lewis turned 2 this fall, so I've begun to think of this whole blog as a record of the baby years of our family -- the seven or so years where our lives were wrapped up in these new, tiny lives who were joining our family. I don't expect our lives to become un-wrapped from our children, of course, but we are moving into a new season of life.

I wanted to get all these posts and pictures and everything into a format in the real world somehow, so I decided to declare this blog finished as of Lewis' 2nd birthday and put together some books with all the writing and photographs. I never did traditional baby books for the kids, so I got copies of these for them, as well as us, and hopefully it will be something that gives them a glimpse into the early years of their childhoods.



I did these books through Blurb and they turned out BEAUTIFUL. I sort of used their slurping blog-to-book thing they do, but I had to manually do the formatting to get it to look the way I wanted. It does blow my mind a bit to consider how much work is in these books, between the original writing and then the putting them together in this form. Making these books was not a quick process.



So that is that! I have started a Tumblr, to give me a spot to write when I feel like it. I don't plan for that to be a record of our family or anything, but rather a place to write in a shorter, more random form. So far it seems like there's a lot of food things related to Lewis' health issues. I also have another Tumblr that is just random, interesting things from around the web. You can also find me on Twitter (or Pinterest or Facebook) but not here any longer. Adios, Blogspot!