Every now and then look over on the left-hand column of Blogger when I’m don’t posting these nightly brain dumps and I notice how many posts I’ve done. I started writing daily posts at the end of 2011 and even though I know I’ve been doing this for a while, it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long.
At this point I can’t imagine not writing a blog post every day, or rather every night. I mostly write at night when the small beings in my household are asleep. Although tonight my husband just rapidly ascended the basement stairs and I heard him yell up to the second floor, “I hear yelling, you should be quiet.”
Writing is something I never was good at in school. I didn’t had the interest or desire to write. I fought long and hard against learning typing and then complained bitterly about my hand getting tired writing out papers by long hand. If the subjects weren’t math or science, they weren’t that interesting to me. Writing and English being furthest away from “fun” as courses, the way I reckoned it.
My mother has always loved words and interesting facts about the English language. To this day I get clippings in the mail from her with quizzes or articles about grammar, language and words. As I grew older I did find a love for words, but not so much for writing. Sure I could hammer out a slew of business emails (now having mastered typing) but creative writing I had little interest in.
Then there was the crisis of 2011 in which we couldn’t remember what my fourteen-month-old son had done a mere eleven months before. My two-month-old daughter was starting to become interesting and the common question of, “was he doing that at the same age?” was seemingly something neither my husband or I could reliably answer with certainty.
Which is the reason this blog was born, mostly to document one thing about each of my children every day. A little catalog of notables, milestones or funny things they say or do as they grow up. And through writing here I decided I rather liked writing. In the early days of the blog I would re-read a post after I’d published it and cringe as I stumbled through typos and awkward sentences.
Then some time and a large number of posts later I decided I didn’t feel like editing because editing to correct mistakes invariably involved overall editing for content and I’d spend three times as long writing my nightly posts, thus making a ten minute job a half-hour. So I accepted the typos and unreadable sentences and figured if my three readers were sticking with me so far, they’d keep hanging in there.
At this point I’ve written over 2100 posts, that being the number I noticed on the left side of Blogger the other night. How many words is that, I wondered? So I did some very flexible math, taking some typical posts and finding out the word count for each and then averaging them. I multiplied that number by 2100 and got a number well over a million words. Then I rounded down, thinking a million words was a decent enough accomplishment to mark for today.
The Big Boy Update: My son was given a Minecraft shirt from my chiropractor’s son, who had grown out of it. This shirt has all the characters, monsters and animals on it—and my son loves it. He wears it every time it’s clean from the wash and back in his drawer. Tonight as he was getting undressed to put on his pajamas he took the Minecraft shirt off and looked at it longingly as he put it in the laundry basket saying, “I can’t believe I’m taking this shirt off…”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter had climbed up the bathroom door frame and was hanging by her fingertips, swinging back and forth (a frightening feat she does at least twenty times each day on door frames across the house). She was silent for a minute—something that rarely happens with her—and then said, “we haven’t seen Mimi and Gramps in a long time. They must’ve died.” We reminded her how she had just talked to them on the phone the other day.
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