I started our first family blog a mere two weeks after Mark and I got married. We were living in a “Kabin” at a KOA Campground and we couldn’t have been happier. And I wanted to document it all.
I never started our blog with the intention of gathering “followers” or anything like that. Mostly, it was just to keep in touch with family and close friends. And I loved that blog.
I wrote a post at least once a week on that blog for eight years {until I started this blog last summer}. I love looking back on that blog. I love that I have our whole married life documented – week by week.
There are some parts of our life that we planned for that have happened and a whole lot that we didn’t expect. But it’s all there. The good and the bad.
There were a lot of times when I didn’t want to keep up with the blog. It felt like one more thing on my never-ending to do list and I wasn’t sure if anyone really read it or cared about what I was saying.
But there was one simple reason I never stopped…I did it for my family and for me.
Every year for Christmas, my gift to the kids are there own scrapbook. The kids love these scrapbooks. It is a whole lot of work on my end but incredibly rewarding too.
And those scrapbooks are made almost exclusively from my blog posts. That is where I get my outline from. That is where I get almost all of the content from. And if I didn’t do my blog, I have no doubt that those scrapbooks would not exist.
Every year I always feel a little down about giving the scrapbooks because I know they expect them and it just feels kind of boring in a way. But every year my kids my kids are THRILLED to have their new scrapbooks {my kids are way too young for fake enthusiasm!}. It always fills my heart and makes all the work completely worth it.
It’s a treasure they get to have with them forever. And that’s why I blog.
With that said though, I also blog for me. For all of the reasons I have already mentioned. I have created a history of our family and that is priceless.
But blogging to me is journaling. I got my first journal when I was nine years old. It had a purple plaid background with Winnie-the-Pooh on the front and I still have it. It’s filled with probably the most not-supposed-to-be-entertaining writing you could ever read. I love reading through it. It’s like diving back into time and seeing what was important to me.
I have probably about six or eight more large journals that saw me finish elementary school and watched me right up to marriage. These are priceless to me. They take me back to different times in my life in a really raw, unfiltered way.
Journaling has been powerful for me. I have always been more of a reserved type of person. It is difficult for me to truly open up to others. To add to that, I am about as non-confrontational as a person can be. If confrontation is around me {I don’t even have to be involved} I have a physical reaction to it. I get nauseous and shaky.
Because of those feelings, I end up being the type of person that bottles a lot of things up. I know it’s not healthy, but it’s what I do. Something happened in my young life that just made me that way. And because of that, I am so grateful for journaling.
It gave me a safe place to “release” my bottle.
Journaling is also really helpful for me to see the bigger picture and even make decisions.
There have been countless times in my life where I was frustrated over a situation or with a person and wrote it all down and either realized that it wasn’t that big of a deal and I just needed to vent it out {journaling works wonders for this!} or sometimes it shows me deeper roots to problems that I didn’t realize. So that when conversations do need to happen, I know more of what really needs to be said.
I have a journal that I have used since I’ve been married but it is extremely sporadic. I married a man that lets me “release” my bottle without judgement. He is a great listener and so some of those reasons for journaling aren’t as necessary for me anymore.
This new blog I started a couple months ago has expanded from my original. It still has our family happenings {and that will never change} but I also add reviews and thoughts about our homeschool life. I kept our homeschooling life pretty in the dark before, but it is a huge part of our life. I know we are learning a lot still and continually evolving but if I can help someone else navigate some things that we have found that works, I would love to do that.
But this blog, it’s something I will do whether I have thousand followers or only my husband reading it. Because at the end of the day, my family is the reason behind all of this. And that is the reason why I keep going with it.
