my new blogging buddy

warning: LONG thoughts for thursday ahead!....

So any of you who know me, know that I love this blog. I love to babble on endlessly and have it floating around out there for any one who cares what trivial thoughts float through my head at any given time of day, as well as for me to look back on. While this did originally start out as simply a vehicle to keep long distance family up to date on our goings-ons, it snowballed into so much more than that. I've always loved journaling, getting my thoughts and feelings out of my head and onto paper. To sort things out, to have it to reflect on later, to be able to go back years from now and think, wow, now I remember that!. To have somewhere to record the seemingly unimportant details of life that in the long run are so fun to look back on.
Sure, the community of the blog world has become a big part of it all for me too... what would I do with myself if I didn't have all of your blogs to browse over each day, laughing with you, learning through you, just opening my eyes to these places and families I might never know if it weren't for this place of community. You've all encouraged me, corrected me, challenged me, and pointed out again and again that we are all in this world together. I value the friendships and connections I've gained thru keeping this little corner of the internet.

But regardless, first and foremost I write for myself. I love looking back over the past two years and reading what was going on in our life. Big changes, big accomplishments, and the little seemingly mundane things that made up each day; I love how it makes my memories so much more detailed. I find myself wishing so often that I had started blogging earlier... that I had things of Savannah's babyhood recorded the way I do Sawyer's. Even earlier: I wish that I had record of what I thought took up so much of my time before we even had kids!! Haha! How did I think I had a busy life and a messy house before them?!
I like seeing my evolution... both in writing and as a mother, a wife, a friend... how am I the same and how am I different in my thoughts, my perspective and my life, comparing back then and now. I can't imagine what it'll be like to look back at it all five or ten years from now. I love that thought.

Anyway. All that to say, I've come to the conclusion that it's never to early to start.

Okay, so combine that conclusion with the fact that my daughter is a writer. I don't know many five year olds I can say that about, but my daughter is A WRITER. It's her absolute favorite thing to do. Well, reading my be a close second, but I think writing definitely comes out ahead. She writes all. day. long. She's constantly writing letters to our neighbors, her friends, her pen pal, notes for us all day long, she writes in her journal, she writes stories in her notebooks, I could go on and on. She'll fill an entire spiral bound notebook in one day if I let her. With words and rhymes and stories. We're running out of paper here!

So that, with the fact that she witnesses me "writing" on the blog and is fascinated by the communication surrounding that (grammas seeing pictures and knowing things that are going on in our life, etc), my daughter is often begging me to let her "do a blog" on our page. She always has wanted to be in on the action and jumping at any chance to do some typing or computer stuff; hence the past guest posts... even before she could fully write her name! Now that she can write by herself and spell and read, she's been asking me at least weekly if she can write on my blog. So after some contemplation I thought; why not give her a whole blog of her own?

I pish-poshed myself at that idea at first... what in the world does a five year old need with a blog? I'm a big proponent of letting kids be kids, that this world already makes them grow up to fast, that they don't need to rush into so many "grown up things" so soon. Heck, my kids don't even know anything about computers. I have friends with other preschoolers who can completely navigate a computer on their own... playing games and even finding their favorite websites on their own! I've always shaken my head at that. Why do they need to know that? Why not be on the floor creating and playing with real live things and be a kid?? I've even found myself a little concerned once in awhile that I'm doing a disservice to my kids that they are completely computer illiterate. They don't even know what a mouse is! How are they going to function when they get into school where it's all about technology now?!

Anyway, I went back and forth with myself for awhile about it. I mean after all, isn't it better that Savannah just write with pen and paper? She's still only learning her skills; better printing, sentence structure, punctuation, etc. Shouldn't she be practicing all that by hand?
(But the amount that she writes, she'll still get plenty of practice, believe me!!)
I realized that with a blog, she would get to practice some of that; learn typing skills, learn computer skills, learn writing/storytelling skills, and we get to do something we enjoy together. She'll also have a new way to more easily keep in touch with some long distant friends and family and most importantly have all of this learning and sharing and storytelling and the start of basic memory archiving to look back on forever.

I started to do some research wondering if I was crazy thinking of starting a blog for my kindergartner... and came across a few articles and websites like this and this. Okay, so I'm not crazy.
And then, just a couple of weeks ago, a blogger I read often shared that her five year old kindergartner started blogging as well.
And that finally sold me. Apparently, I'm not so crazy, it's not such a far fetched idea, and maybe we could make this work.

So. Without further ado, I present to you:
our very own
New Kid on the Blog
Feel free to stop over and say hi to her. She's excited about this new project and has already posted a couple of times in the week or so we've had it up and running. Check in regularly for a peek into the perspective of a five year old in the blog world!!

And in regards to Thoughts for Thursday... if you want to, let me know (kindly if you disagree) what you think of kids blogging, kids on the internet and kids on the computer at increasingly young ages in general.