thank you for sharing

Thank you, thank you, and thank you to everyone who added advice on the service post. You all shared so many wonderful ideas and insights. I was also so happy to hear from those of you that I didn't even know were checking out our blog. I always love connecting with friends from the past and making new friends. I have decided to be on the look out for more service opportunities (including being less selfish in sharing my husband's time and enjoying special moments to appreciative my wonderful children) for the next couple of weeks while also using some of the ideas that you have suggested. I will report back on what I have learned. Thank you for all your support. I feel loved a virtually hugged.

I kind of feel like an unintentional blogger. Lonnie and I started our blog as a contact point for adoption. We were told that we would have to wait until we had been married for two years before we could officially sign up with LDS Family Services. We were also advised that we should be ready for a long wait once we were officially signed up. After two years of infertility and a strong desire to have a family (along with having waited until I was 30 years old to get married) I wanted to do something right away to start our family. I wanted something I could work on everyday that would help me feel empowered. We had heard so many wonderful stories about a friend of a friend or a distant relative who had found out that a couple were interested in adopting and then connected them to a women looking for a couple to adopt her baby. So we reached out to our friends and family to help expand our family. We hoped our blog would be a place where people could come and get to know a little about us. We had heard about people using websites, but we liked the idea that our blog would be a place that friends and family would come to often and remember us when the topic of adoption was brought up. So we shared our stories (sometimes more that I would have shared had I not felt the need to be open and vulnerable) and hoped that somehow we would be connected to someone who was also looking for us.

No, we never got a strong adoption referral from our blog, but we did let the world know that we were interested in having a family and maybe more importantly I was able to feel like I was doing something small everyday to build my family. We took a risk and put ourselves out there.

Then one year and nineteen days ago (yes, we know the exact date) thanks to some good doctors and lots of prayers we got pregnant and a few weeks later we found out that we were expecting not only one but two babies and we started a whole new adventure.

Now I am part of the ever-growing group of mommy bloggers. To be honest I don't normally think of myself as a very open person and I don't think I would have started a blog were in not for the original intention. I love to hear other people's stories but I tend to be a bit more vague about my own. So what is our blog now? I' not really sure. Is it a photo album for adoring grandparents, a memory book for the kids, and a public journal for our whole family, sounding board for me, or a new type of online community? I'm still trying to figure it all out but it the meantime I will continue to write when I feel inclined and I will continue to post photos and stories of our kids (it never hurts to hear other people tell us that they are as cute as we think they are). On Monday when I was having a hard time getting the kids to nap and I was exhausted from all the crying (my tolerance is low because the babies thankfully are usually pretty happy), Lonnie suggested that I get advice form my blogging friends.

Sometimes I feel like I am writing our story. But there are so many things left out....so many posts I started but never finished and posted, so many events, thoughts and thanks that are not recorded. There are also so many joys and struggles that never get posted because they are so eventful that I get caught up in the moment and can't seem to put the experiences into words or photos. Maybe one day I will finish as my unfinished posts. Maybe one day I will get better at telling our stories. In them meantime, this is what we get.

Why do you blog? Who do you blog for? What are your motivations? Are you ever surprised at what you are willing to publicly post? Are you ever thrown off when someone knows something about you they learned about you over the internet?

I also added a photo for those of you who don't really like to read blogs and only want to look at photos.