Thanks for saying it all just so well, that other’s have to steel your words just to get it right.

-Julia

Good luck to you!

thanks for the comment. it is certainly a struggle sometimes (for me!) to stay positive yet real, and true to your feelings yet not offend anyone. i agree that it is often a self-centeredness that sees insult everywhere.

on censorship–i hate when others censor me or censor things for me, but i believe quite strongly in self-censorship (esp. censorship of whatever media we consume).

When I first started my blog I was really careful about what I wrote, I knew my family would be reading it. Cassie said I should just be myself and who cares what people think. SO I started to write whatever I wanted, and got this HORRIBLE backlash of nastiness from Brad’s family members. Brad’s aunt even established a myspace page for the sole purpose of posting nasty comments on my blog, which is why I no longer allow public comments, which makes me sad, I hate censorship, but there you go. From that point on, anytime I said anything that could be construed as a negative someone in Brad’s family would think I was bashing them. For example, I once wrote about how rude and silly I think it is to wear a bluetooth device at all times, I had been to Virginia’s birthday party and her uncle was on it the whole time. I got an email from my SIL who thought I was dissing her, I didn’t even know she had a bluetooth! She lives in Arizona!

I had to explain to my in-laws that my blog is about my opinion, and my own wonderment of life in general, and that it is rather conceited of them to think I am always writing about them.

So I still basically blog whatever I want, but I include a lot of disclaimers and try to keep it as positive as possible.

The problem of focus on a blog does pose an interesting problem. A lot people want to have multiple themes for their blog. For example, Tara has her Tara Thinks blog and her family blog. I think having both be separate is a mistake, because it’s work enough to maintain one blog, much less two of them.

There are customization options that can help solve this. For example, you can restrict certain categories of posts from appearing on the home page. You can also exclude categories from feeds too. But if I wanted to write about a family event as a guest blogger (which is a common activity — guest blogging), I could do it discretely in a separate category.

Pretty soon our children will start blogs. And then their friends will have blogs. And then we’ll have an interesting little blogger family, all writing in our own spaces to our own readers and also keeping up on each others’ posts.

when i say Adam is a salesman, i’m referring to his nature, not his level on the corporate ladder. he buys and sells stuff, and he hires (buys) people to do that for him. that’s great. i wish i could figure out how to do that in my own life; it is just so completely foreign to my nature (which is prob why i am poor; and i can pretend that i’m trying to be thoreau, but then i’d prob have to give up my minivan).

i mentioned adam (well, i was trying to be funny with the willy loman reference. geez, maybe i just think things are funny that no one else even remotely thinks are; oh well, it made me smile) because of those mom blogs that have all the ads and are basically businesses. and my doing my blog like that is just as foreign to my nature (prob to my detriment).

i think as long as we are home with the kids, we can do whatever we want!!

yes, you should come visit. too bad we’re not in that exotic of a locale anymore. nyc or cairo would’ve been more exciting.

I met up with a family friend I hadn’t seen for years and I told her how much I enjoyed reading and she said she ignores her kids too much when she reads, so she doesn’t read much. I told her I keep my sanity as a stay-at-home mom by reading. And, I was saying to myself, aren’t we allowed to ignore our kids just a little during the day? Just a little? Fortunately, my girls are playing nicely together and I can just spend time commenting on Shannon’s blog.

Hey, you have no pictures of our family! You’d think we never visited you in Egypt or Florida–oh, wait, we didn’t/haven’t. We need to get on an airplane!!!