In which a "blogger" blogs about her blog and blogging (or the lack thereof)

I'm not one to hold a grudge. I'm not one to admit I hold a grudge. But I really hold a grudge against Google for making it so easy for me to accidentally send all of my blog photos into cyber limbo for FOREVER. It's not that I don't have those photos digitally and safely tucked away in another location, but when time is such a commodity, it is difficult to justify spending so much of it retrieving old photos.

That's reason #1 why I haven't been blogging.

It used to be when several days had passed without a Treasured Chapters post, my family would send all sorts of hints. One sister-in-law would write between the lines of a family email, "I would know what was going on in Mark and Kathleen's lives if Kathleen were updating her blog." Or my mother-in-law would call and say how much she missed her grandchildren and could barely remember what they looked like because there weren't any recent pictures of them on the blog. Or I'd see my husband clicking unnecessarily to the blog from his favorites only to be greeted with a months' old post about making bread.

The hints stopped coming awhile back, so I knew they had all just given up on me, written off the best way I had found to span the literal distance between us and our loved ones. But then this morning, my sister-in-law gave it one last valiant try by posting an all too familiar hint on my Facebook wall, a hint hidden in a comment on a photo.

And so I picked up my metaphorical pen and put it to the virtual paper again.

What's funny is that, even after months of silence, I still see my group of followers there on my dashboard, summed up to a nice even number: 100. I never thought I would have a hundred followers, and I did meet some AMAZING people out there in Blog World back when this was more my world. But keeping up with so many people and their blogs...that task became absolutely overwhelming to me. Reason #2 I stopped blogging.

Of course, a major case of writer's block doesn't help matters. And that's what I've had. Reason #3 I haven't been blogging. However, one of my New Year's resolutions was to read more. I'm on book #10 already. Submersing myself in and surrounding myself by words has helped my own flow of words press on into a sophistication that at least narrowly surpasses the normal words that interrupt my day: "Stop hitting your sister", "Eat over your plate", "Seriously. You've got to clean up this mess!" The reading, the immersing myself in the words, has been a great remedy to set my own words spinning about in my head.

Even though the words are freely flowing now, reason #4 I stopped blogging is that our lives have become seemingly incredibly mundane. I don't recall such a humdrum season of homeschooling as that which we are currently in. But then, by ignoring all of these tedious moments, I am ignoring my own mantra from Lucy Calkins: "I write to hold what I find in my life in my hands and declare it a treasure". Haven't I always told my students that even if moments of life seem dull and insignificant, if those moments are your moments, they ARE significant? That if those moments are captured properly in writing, they can also become significant to others?

I am the worst at taking my own advice.

But here I am nonetheless. A lot really has happened since I last poised my fingers atop these keys to spill words across this page. And now that I think about it, those events - a trip to Hawaii, a week-long power outage, a birthday, swim meets, basketball games, Christmas - those aren't boring happenings after all.

These tales, however, will likely never be told here because it is far easier to move forward than to try to catch up.