Jonathan's Blog

Mom got a message in her inbox this week that Jonathan's blog was considered a "Blogger Legacy" account and Blogger is twilighting all these types of accounts as of the end of May.  She asked me to go and save it since she didn't want to lose the posts or pictures even though the blog hasn't been updated in six years.

I haven't been on Blogger for quite a while; and actually, it's been so long since I updated Jonathan's site that I didn't have the foggiest idea what the password was.  I retrieved everything, though, and moved the blog to my name while applying a new template so the blog can live on.

There's something sad about a blog that hasn't been updated in six years, though.  I started thinking of all the updates we should've done, like the day Jonathan got his glasses for the first time, or the day he took his first steps at the age of three.  Not to mention talking about moving to a new house or the first time he said, "Mom!"  It's hard to believe the last time I wrote an update on that site, Jonathan was crawling and almost two years from walking.  Thing is, I began it when he was born and we didn't know how long he would be in the hospital or how he was going to do when we got him home.  He wasn't just our newest baby: he was our newest baby with a whole train of question marks in tow and all our friends and family were concerned about what was going on with him.  It was hard to keep everyone updated and the blog was the easiest way to keep in touch.  Once he'd been home for years and was growing just fine, having whole website entries devoted to him seemed unnecessary and time-consuming.  So I stopped.

One of the things about keeping a blog is that it's hard to see what's going to be important to you in the future at the time that you're sitting there trying to figure out to write.  I often sit down and think, "What can I write about that's not going to be boring?"  When you're keeping a blog about a little boy who takes years to learn what many kids learn in weeks or months, updating frequently is a slow and boring process at the time; but today as I was looking at that six year blank in the archives, I realized I should've stuck to it anyway.

Mom Turner has what amounts to a dedicated hobby of documenting everything that happens in the lives of her family through photographs and short story paragraphs.  When you go down in their basement, you're confronted with rows and rows of photo albums that have been numbered and organized and packed onto shelves lining the walls: rows of documentation of things that would otherwise be forgotten.  It's an awe-inspiring sight even to a determined minimalist like me who goes through her possessions and tosses a good chunk of them regularly because I don't like keeping Collections of Stuff in order.  It's awe-inspiring because it's a record, a careful collection of moments otherwise too small to remember.  A well-kept blog is something very similar (though I admit this one is seriously short on photographs!).

Which brings me to why I'm updating today.  Because sometimes I procrastinate posting here.  Because reviving Jonathan's blog and applying a new template to it reminded me that I do have a live site and it's worth keeping that way.  Six years down the road I'll be happy I did.  Because one moment I can remember today is that I brought Jonathan's website out of retirement after putting it off for six years.  Now that's procrastination.