I’ve often thought about how long I’ll keep this blog up. I started it almost 11 years ago as a way to document and share our life with close friends and family. At the time, bloggers were a unique and fairly small community. Facebook wasn’t even a thing yet and Twitter had yet to exist. So the best way to share stories online was through a blog.

As the years have gone on, I’ve wrestled with how much information is prudent to share. Sure, personal info like birthdates, addresses, and license plate numbers are pretty much a given for censoring, but when it comes to parenting and kids, there are a lot of gray areas. I hope I’ve navigated it well so far, but especially as Keana approaches the young adult years, it becomes more and more clear that my role as the storyteller is shifting, and at some point they take on that role for themselves.

Keana is already a prolific writer but prefers not to share personal stories with others. And I’m pretty sure there will come a time when she’s just not going to want me to share anything here, and I want to respect that. So is that the point when I stop writing about each child? Check in with them regularly and stop when they say? I can easily shift to general parenting shares and maybe family vacation photos, but then I wonder if it’s time to move to a private journal and private photo albums? Maybe I shift the focus of updates to something like Facebook for the handful of family and friends that enjoy hearing and seeing what’s going on with us? And there’s always the option of password protecting the site.

I have other issues with depending on third party options (like Facebook or Medium) for information sharing, but I also want to make sure that everything I share here is safe and okay with the family members I share about. Maybe this will become more clear as the kids approach those teenage years.

There’s something about sharing publicly that motivates me to write and curate photos, and this blog has always been a valuable thinking space. The feedback and comments I’ve gotten over the years has been wonderful and I really feel like it’s a positive connection to those that read. I’d love to hear what others think or have done for their own blogs/web spaces, and I’ll continue to think and write about it until the way is more clear.