I'm trying to catch up

I love blogging, I really do. I don't do it for money or an audience, I do it because I like to keep track of the little things. I'm pretty sure I don't even have an audience anymore and that's okay with me. I never started blogging to entertain people. I do like that family and friends have a way of checking in on us, if they want to. I like that someone else who is moving to Italy with four kids might stumble on my blog and feel a little more reassured that they can do it. (Hey it's happened before and we're still friends on facebook after moving. Hi Riann!). I'm happy that little tutorials of mine end up on Pintrest and help someone else out.

But the well-child check ups, the day trips, the cute little stories and funny things the kids say...I know it's just ''mom stuff'' and I like it. I like that I can, with the click of a button, immediately look back on everything we did November 2008. That I can see how much the kids have grown without having to pull out the external hard drive. That I can see when they hit milestones without a self-inflected guilt trip when I pull out a damn-near-empty baby book. I know when they took their first steps. I know when I cut their hair for the first time or any other trivial little fact....because I blogged. I frequently say "I don't know where that picture is" or "I'm not sure when we went there" but I can almost always answer with ''But I know I blogged about it." and with a small search, immediately whatever it was we were looking for, it's there.

So when I look at the archive on the left and see months that have just one post, it upsets me that I didn't take two seconds to post something. I know that I'm busy living life and not blogging about it but I also know that it's never going to happen if I don't make time for it. I was just as busy in 2010 and 2011. I had four kids, had just moved and still found time to blog. I blame my lack of blogging on myself, having an iPhone and social media. It is SO easy to upload a pic to Instagram or Facebook with a quick byline and be done. But six months later when I want to show someone, I can't find it. Or at least not easily. I downloaded an app for blogging (BlogPress) but it constantly has glitches, the pictures are either super tiny or super grainy and I end up usually quitting after I've written half a post.

So, my point (I do have one!) is that I am going to try to be better. I'm going to try to update more often. The funny little things that the kids say. The pictures from playing at the park. The embarrassing stories, the illnesses. These are things that I look back on (literally, I click on 2009 and just read) that make me go ''Man, Logan hasn't changed a bit" or "I can't believe Maggie is older now than Ryan was when Connor was born...Ryan seemed so big then and Maggie seems so little now''. It's the reminders of where we have been. The tiny two bedroom duplex that we all six once lived in. The anxiety over moving to Italy. It's the memories that I don't want to lose.

This morning, I spent a few hours updating the blog but I did it by back dating the posts. So that trip to Slovenia and Croatia that we went on in July but never blogged about? Yeah, it's posted in September now as a ''throwback''. Maggie's birthday party, Halloween, our trip to Kansas...are all posted now in the month it should have been posted. I'm going to still do ''throwbacks'' on trips we took because I think they're fun and I don't want all my posts to get buried in the past. But I am back-dating the ones that are time sensitive to when they happened (Holiday's, Birthday's, etc).