bus blogging, chapter four

When the return to full-time work was looming ahead of me just a couple short months ago, I pondered what I was going to be able to continue doing online and what projects were going to fade away. A few things have happened in the time since then, and the 5 Minutes for Books weekly column at the Kirkus Reviews Blog was discontinued, so that one was out of my hands. Recently, I made the decision to stop writing for my town's Patch, for several reasons, but one of them was that my weekly feature was bumped down to once a month, which was actually harder to remember to keep up with. Though my contributions have significantly lessened, there's no way I want to leave 5 Minutes for Books (ever!!), and I'm happy to be a part of a recently launched site, The DC Moms.

And then there's this, my silly little blog. The place where it all began almost five years ago. I've often reflected on why I blog, especially since I originally started this seven years ago and then promptly forgot about it for two years after just a few posts. When I returned to it, I was preparing to stop working in favor of embracing the SAHM lifestyle. I think at the time this served several purposes: to help me figure out this major lifestyle change, to provide an outlet for the thoughts that suddenly had time to accrue, to be a connection to an outside world I suddenly felt significantly disconnected from, and to help me return to my first real passion in life-- expressing myself through writing.

But when I was ready to turn around on that lifestyle road, I wondered what role my blog would play in my new life, one without even small blocks of time to myself. For the most part, I can't document my Monday through Friday existence, seeing as I'm not writing an education blog, and regardless of how funny my stories may be of my wacky preschool class, I'm not risking any privacy issues by putting them out there in the blogosphere. Our family life experiences consist mostly of day-to-day routine stuff, so there's not much excitement in that... wanna hear about the joys of getting two kids out of the house before 7 am? Or of the emotional turmoil suffered by all the children during the first month of school? Life is busy and hectic, but that isn't necessarily what I want to document and look back upon someday.

Perhaps the new purpose of the blog is to remind myself that I did have thoughts independent of the work that takes up the vast majority of my waking hours. In the future, when I look back at these posts, I can be reminded of who I still strove to be when I was not working, that I was something other than my job. Maybe I don't have the time to put it all down in writing, but every once in a while, I still get the chance to pull together something that reflects my interests, my beliefs, my thoughts (exactly) from this point in my life.

When I look back, this silly little blog will be a good record of who I was, who I longed to be, and who I became. I plan on continuing it for as long as I can.


Navel-gazing once more,