Why has this blog, and so many that I used to follow regularly, gone stale? Hmm...
1) No time... blogging requires time to reflect, and time to write... most of the blogs I have followed are written by moms (a few are dads) with young children and hectic lives... Personally, my worklife has become more demanding as I've ramped up by career and supervise quite a few (maybe too many) graduate students. I think time constraints have played a big role in the collective blog neglect of many of us.
2) Facebook... is Facebook replacing the blog as a means of expressing what's going on in our lives? I've only been a FB user for about 6 months or so, and I do find it much easier to read friends' "updates" or "walls" than to spend time going to blog links. And forget having blog posts sent directly to e-mail. My e-mail volume is already more than I can usually handle. Do people really want to read blogs any more? I'm not sure.
3) Shifting priorities... in my blogging world, most of my fellow bloggers have some connection to international adoption. Most of us started blogging as a means to communicate with other families in the same boat as we were: waiting for the process of international adoption to be completed, so we could bring our kids home. Thankfully for most (but still not all families, if you can believe it), our kids are at home and they have now become individuals to us, not mere concepts, who have a right to privacy. Its challenging to walk that line between respecting your children's privacy and being a proud parent. I've never felt that I've navigated those waters well, and I've probably erred often on the side of caution... meaning a boring blog for readers! But, that's OK, I came to terms long ago that this blog is for me, not for anyone else, when all is said and done!
4) Shifting interests... dare I say it? Is adoption as interesting a topic to me any longer, now that our family life with our son consists of everything that all families, whether formed through adoption or birth, experience: making lunches, piano lessons, weekend basketball tournaments, walking dogs, picking up groceries, cleaning floors (ok, I really don't do much of that!), etc., etc.... I can say that "yes", I am still very much interested in how families form through adoption and in advocating for adoption services. But since my own experiences with the process are not recent, I don't find myself as caught up in the stories as I once was. That's just life, I guess.
SO...what to do? Maybe nothing. I don't think Blogger resents the space that a mostly-defunct blog takes up. OR, maybe a re-invention, for reals this time... Not sure, we'll have to see...
