New Year, New Blog

I've been thinking of starting up a new blog for the new year. New look, new ideas, but a lot of the old stuff too. A lot has changed since I started blogging over three years ago. Dustin and I had only been married for a few months. Since then, I've graduated from USU, we've moved two times, had two kids, Dustin started an internship, and now he'll be graduating in a few months. I want to have my old blog printed into a few nice books for our family to have, as a way to look back on how we've grown together.

There are a few specific things I want to change about this new blog. First, I want to start including a personal history portion. I found a couple websites that have tips on writing your personal history, and every so often I want to do a personal history post. I have never been good at keeping a journal because I'm the kind of person to think I have to write a massive catch-up entry if I slack off, and the thought of writing down all the details of a two or three year journal hiatus makes me ill. So I never catch up. I'm hoping starting this personal history will be a way to make sure I am still recording the important things in life, even though I am not a faithful journal writer.

I also want to make an effort to record more of my spiritual growth and thoughts. I think it's important to write down the spiritual experiences we have, so we can look back at them and remember all the times God has helped us and all the good things in life. I haven't quite come up with a specific way to do this yet, but I am hoping I'll be able to find a good way to keep up with it.

Another thing I want to do on this blog, but I'm not quite sure if I'm ready for it, is practice writing. I love writing and I am a good writer, but my best writings have all been critical analyses for my English Literature degree. I am not practiced at story writing or personal essays, but I'd like to get better at them because I miss the feeling of putting my thoughts into words, and the feeling of knowing you picked exactly the right words for your thoughts. Of course, I have been writing on my blog all along, but most of my posts are just the day-to-day happenings of my life. I usually just write whatever comes to mind without much thought about editing or word choice. So I'd like to write more, but we'll see if I actually get brave enough to do it.

Of course, I think the reason most of you come to my blog is to see pictures of my family and hear about our life. I'll still do periodic updates about my daughters and our life. I like doing those posts and I think they are also important. Most of my posts will probably be pretty much the same as they've always been. But I'm hoping to make some little changes too. Hopefully all my old blog read readers will keep coming by to read about my family and our life.

To end this first post, a picture of my girls clapping together. I love them.

As always, thanks for stopping by!