Grasshopper New Media Presents...

I write about my family — a lot. My wife, 2 1/2-year old daughter Fern, and her sister-to-be are fodder not only for my pieces here at GNM Parents and my public blog, Doodaddy, but also quarterly articles for a local parenting magazine, an advice Web site, a private family blog, two Twitter accounts, and occasional short pieces on another two or three social networks.

Yikes!

So when I’m talking to another parent and mention all this writing I do, their responses range from incredulity to worry for my sanity. And it’s true, I do spend a lot of time on this hobby, but I want to convince you — every parent, pre-parent, grandparent, or anyone else with kids in their lives — to do exactly the same:

Get out there and blog.

I have a thousand reasons for all this writing I do; here are the three I hope will convince you to start, too, if you don’t already:

1. Pictures aren’t enough. If you’re like me, you’ll remember sifting through your childhood photo albums from about the age as you could pull them off the shelf. I would page through them, wondering at the old hairstyles, but what captivated me most were the few little captions my mom had written in. But there aren’t many of those, sadly. I recall one picture of me with my brother, both of us in Halloween costumes, for some reason visiting a bank branch. I dimly remember those bank employees — I think they were especially friendly to us, or maybe we lived nearby. But I don’t remember their names, or how we met — I just vaguely know that they were important to us right at that point in our lives. That’s one of a hundred stories I ache for now, many years later.
2. Writing smoothes over the rough patches. I had a horrible Monday this week — I couldn’t get Fern to eat, a man yelled at me at the playground, I felt overwhelmed by the thought of our baby coming so soon. By nap time I was ready to curl up into a ball… but I didn’t. Instead, I sat down and wrote about the day, and as soon as I hit “Publish” a weight lifted off my shoulders. The ache of the day remained, but dimmed, and I could get on to moving the next mountain. Without the daily exercise of writing, I think I would still be on my couch in fetal position, having served my family nothing but saltines for dinner.
3. It’s not that hard. Fledgling parent writers look at a site they know and respect — this one, for example — and think they have to emulate it before they can legitimately be “bloggers.” Nothing can be further from the truth. Writing as a parent is primarily for you and secondarily for the gift of stories you give to your children. All the trappings of a popular blog, the scads of readers — well, they’ll come eventually, or they won’t: it doesn’t matter. What does matter is telling — and recording — your story.

Here’s a couple of ideas to help you get started:

• When in doubt, Twitter. Twitter is a site that lets you post very short entries — just 140 letters, tops! A few times a week, Fern will say something really wonderful — tonight it was “Are we having a girls’ night out, mommy?” — and I’ll enter it into Twitter. You can post to it in lots of different ways — on the Web or by sending a text message from your cell phone, or even (with a little work) by recording a message on a special number at Jott, another site. (If you want to see what Fern’s said recently, click here.)
• Caption one picture a week. Make sure that at least one picture every week has some sort of caption on it. You can use a photo-sharing Web site like flickr for this or any of the blog Web sites.
• Write for family. When you start out, imagine you are sending out a monthly family newsletter. Your family probably isn’t too fussed about your word choices or punctuation — they want the stories you’ve got inside you — so you shouldn’t be, either. And just like those family letters, infrequent is fine. You can blog once a month, if you want, but keep it regular. I post a letter to Fern our our family site, for example, every month on the day of her birth.

Lastly, I’ll just say that you shouldn’t be scared by the technology. Setting up a blog on Blogger, Wordpress, or any of the other standard sites is as easy as writing e-mail. But if you put in the effort to write up even a bare few of your daily successes and challenges, you’ll be creating a permanent record that you’ll be able to enjoy for years — and so will your kids.

by Doodaddy

Photo graciously provided by Cayusa, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved