look.

So I have a confession to make. I've been blogging a long time. Like, a l-o-o-o-n-g time. Lots longer than that "July 2007" archives thingy over on my sidebar would have you believe. I think I started blogging in late 1998? Could that be? Does that sound right? Erin, Jill, can you back me up here? I know that it was pre-2000 because I distinctly remember worrying how the Y2K thing would affect my blog. I blogged before blogging was as cool and as commonplace as is it today. Now that every mother / father / sister / brother / high school MBFF /college roommate / old coworker / going out buddy / current best friend has a blog, I find that my blogging life and my real life are colliding and meshing into one. (No, not kidding, even my Mom and Dad have Facebook profiles. Hi Mom! Hi Dad!!)

See, you used to be able to keep these things separate. No one blogged, and if they did, they sure didn't talk about it in real life. It used to be that you mentioned a friend you had met "from the internet" and you were looked at shock-faced and met with a "What??! Eww!! You are meeting someone from ONLINE?!!! How do you know they're not a creep?!!" You were also thought of as an incredible nerd from that point on. But now you see friendships forging and making the online-to-real life crossover all the time. Those two girls I called out earlier? The reason they'd know how long I've been keeping a blog is because I met them online years and years ago and I consider them to be two of my best friends, real life or not. We've never met in real life (yet), but you know what? They've seen me through dating, college, getting married, being lonely when I lived in California and knew no one, getting pregnant, having Mason, struggling with making the transition to being a full time Mom, and now moving back to Utah where again I know no one. I don't have many real life friends that I can say have been with me through all that.

So what's the reason I'm telling you all this? There really are a few:

I'm telling you this because I'm doing away with my "secret blog" - it's not really a secret, but it was kept "friends only" and now no longer exists anywhere online. All the archives are safely stored on my external hard drive and backed up on CD, though. They're wonderful.

I'm telling you this because it became increasingly difficult to keep my blogging life and my real life separate - now you hear people talking about blogs and blogging and writing such-and-such on my blog just as often as you hear people talking about the weather. Now that I have this public blog, I kept being faced with people wondering how I learned how to do it, how I knew Photoshop so well or how I could write HTML or CSS. What did I tell them? That I was a closet blogger? That would have just required MORE explaining and solicited MORE looks of "Wow, you really are a nerd!"

I'm telling you this because I'm trying to do my part to forward the cause of Bloggers being accepted by the world - blogging is here to stay and is only going to become MORE commonplace and done by MORE people. And Bloggers are really cool people, too. Like I said previously, Erin and Jill are only a few of the fantastic people I've met online. Erin is my wonder twin living in Boston, going to grad school, and becoming an internet superstar in her own right with her fabulous food blog, Erincooks.com. Jill is my incredibly cool Switzerland-living friend, who gets to travel the world and have all sorts of adventures. Jen is my sweet pop-culture junkie friend that I furiously text every week during American Idol, even though she lives in Texas and we've never met in real life. Grace is my awesome OC friend that is now my awesome OC penpal, I went to her daughter's first birthday party right before I moved to Utah. Autumn is my saving grace here in my new neighborhood - we met online on a Salt Lake Mommy's forum and ended up living only a few houses away from each other. Now we see each other all the time and can complain about neighborhood things together and try to get our husbands to babysit our sons so we can go to the gym together.

I'm telling you this because it just became too much work to keep two separate blogs, wondering what I should write about here versus there and who was reading it. Now it's just easier to have one center place where I can blab on and post a gazillion pictures of my adorable son for you to gush over. And if you don't want to gush over him or read my ramblings? No problem - no harm, there's a million blogs nowadays, so you're sure to find one you do like. I'm not out to have the most hits or to make the most money off my blog - I just really like the idea of being able to document our little family's life and the adventures we have. And the icing on the cake is being able to re-meet and keep connected with old and new friends, neighbors, boyfriends (yikes!), coworkers, schoolmates and family members. Wow -- there really are a lot of you out there!

Speaking of which - I'm taking this opportunity to make a formal request for all you lurkers out there to step out of the shadows and comment! That's really the bread and butter of the blogging world - it all comes down to social networking. Like my friend Tiburon said in her recent post about blogging etiquette - a blog is like someones home on the internet, and reading without commenting is like peeking in the windows without ringing the doorbell to say hello. So say hello - I'd love to know that you're reading. Whether or not you think I'm a huge nerd.