Blogging the Family
Blogs can be (and often are) so very personal. It's a natural to use one's blog to write about your kids and family. Particularly if you have young kids, they are likely the focus of your life, and the generators of much stress and joy!
Perhaps this explains why there are an estimated 8,500 Web logs people are writing about their children. Some high profile weblogs written about kids by their parents:
- Her own woman: Same sex parents in Australia
- Heather B. Armstrong's "This is my Website" Unleashing the inner monologue: "...there were kids, in my living room, EATING ICE CREAM ON MY PERSIAN RUG WITH THEIR HANDS — that Jon and I made it through the day without experiencing cardiac arrest or any ruptured blood vessels, well, people, this TOTALLY means that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is nigh unto us."
- Mimi Smartypants: "I don't care if you are the Dark Lord of the Sith, young man, you are still getting a time out!"
- Bad Mother: Something to distract my neighbor here in Berkeley, Ayelet Waldman, from her presumably already too-busy life as novelist, mother to four, and wife of Michael Chabon (bless him!)
- Hot Moms: "Writing our momoirs" (links to more than 600 mom and dad blogs)
- finslippy: Alice Bradley writes about two-year-old Henry
Now, to state the obvious, my blog is not about parenting and kids or is only obliquely about it: since in some fundamental way my life is about my family and kids, they do seem to creep into this thing even when I am writing about Google. But my preference is to not to blog Julian, Nicholas, and Mathew. Rather, I keep a kind of photo album on our personal Website. As someone observed to me, this in itself constitutes a kind of extended blog. It is this (not surprising) characteristic that pictures never get removed, only added. And the pictures of Julian, our oldest, are the most extensive. (But then, since Julian was a 28 week preemie, we had our reasons. That's a whole other story.)
Anyhow, I think this use of blogging to rend a hole in the isolation that the joys and terrors of parenting imposes upon us is a great thing! Keep it up, mom and pop bloggers!
Posted by Harold Davis at January 31, 2005 09:32 AM
