Why I'm Coming Back

It's been awhile... more than 6 months since I posted here. How to come back? How to recap all of what's gone on in our family over the last 6 months? And probably more importantly, why?

If you keep up with us on Facebook, none of what I'll be posting here over the next few days will be news to you. I wonder why I continue blogging then, when in many ways, Facebook seems to have replaced this blog in terms of being able to share our day-to-day lives with family and friends both near and far. And then I remember -- I keep this blog more for myself than for anyone else. It really has become a sort of digital record of our family's life, adventures and misadventures (and thanks to Blurb software, I am able to turn each year of our blog into an actual book -- like a family yearbook). I am still scrapbooking... and I love the creative process of scrapbooking and how it allows me to showcase our pictures, but I have fallen so far behind over all our years of moving hither and yon that I fear I will never catch up. So this blog really is my best and most current record of our goings-on.

Over the last few days, I have been busy gathering the required documentation for our trip to the U.S. Embassy tomorrow. Elizabeth needs her U.S. birth certificate, passport, and Social Security card, and Alex and Stephen both need new passports before we renew our visas next month. One of the things we are required to bring is photographic evidence of the life of each child. Most of our pictures that are more than 2 or 3 years old are archived on a portable hard drive and are currently inaccessible due to a fried cord, so I turned to our family blog to pull pictures of Alex and Stephen to print. I enjoyed my walk down memory lane, but it struck me as I was perusing the archives of our blog, that if I don't keep posting, keep updating, there won't be a similar record of Elizabeth's life, and there won't be family yearbooks to print.

So, I'm back. You're welcome to keep following along with us here, and I will enjoy the company, but I really am doing this for me. I'll start with continuing the monthly recaps that I was doing before my long hiatus over the next few days, and then try to keep things current going forward.