It All Adds Up

I was just (belatedly) updating Susie's age in my profile over there in the sidebar, and I thought, "Hmmm, 12 - when I set up this blog, she was only 2." Employing my prodigious math skills, I realized that, hey, that means I've been jotting things down here for 10 solid years.

An entire decade.

Messy Knitter Syndrome (MKS)

It was 10 years ago that I was sitting in our basement (because at that point we still kept the computer down there so that it wouldn't take over our family life, and OMG isn't that quaint) and thought up the title of this blog. I was very proud of myself. Not being very familiar with blogs OR the Internet, I thought I was probably the ONLY ONE with such a clever blog name.

I still really like the name, actually. But I know there are better ones out there. And better writers. And people with way more interesting lives. But, hey, this is mine. Without really planning to, I've inadvertently catalogued our lives for the past 10 years, and maybe, at some point, my kids will find it fun to read back over all this. Because they sure as heck aren't going to be able to reminisce over the non-existent family photo albums. I lost my grip on those about, oh, hey, 10 years ago.

I guess that's not a coincidence, huh?

Flowers are still alive, thanks to the rain

But, you know, a photo album wouldn't let the kids know the details of Larry's frightening foray into the wizarding world, or how I was briefly famous among German au pairs, or that our broken dishwasher inspired an honest-to-God appliance poetry slam.

A photo album definitely wouldn't tell them how the purchase of a rolling cooler backfired on me, or how much fun it was to take David to his first "real" movie at the ripe old age of 14, or how their father and I HAVE experienced a few rare moments of perfect marital harmony.

What gets me is, I didn't think anything much was happening all those years. And, on the scale of world events, that was true. But in the microcosm of our daily lives, writing this blog helped me catch all those little moments that really do add up to this thing called a lifetime. And for that, I am grateful. Maybe my kids will be, too.

And they DO have all those refrigerator clean-out photos - there's that.