Signing off now.

We started this blog over eight years ago with a very simple purpose. The girls were about to arrive, and knowing that our time would be limited, it seemed more convenient to push updates to a blog that everyone could read, rather than attempt to give updates via telephone to all our friends and relatives. I had no idea how well it would work in this regard.

Somewhere over those initial posts it also became a chronicle of the family for the kids to have when they got older. I began to think about it sometimes as a letter I was writing to them, so that they might have a contemporary account of those events off in the shady mists of their parent's memories, and then ultimately, their own. I know as a kid my mother kept photo albums that held thin but precious slices of time, and I enjoyed looking through them, especially the ones where I made an appearance. As the fifth child who came at the tail end of a failing marriage, I have very few pictures from my youth, and given the bumpy years following my parents' divorce, it's a wonder any picture of me before age five exist at all. So for my kids, I wanted them to have a fuller account of their early lives, and as the blog began to take shape it became clear to me that it would serve that purpose perfectly.

And then over the years, as the cares of life and the foibles of age set upon us, the blog began to be a way to keep track of things for myself and for Rachel. And in the times when I scan back over the years, I can say that there is little chance that I would remember even a quarter of what's contained in these pages. So the blog began to serve a third purpose, the official family record. What year did we do this or that? Check the blog. So it became very handy.

But on the first point, keeping people posted on our lives, I think the blog worked perhaps too well over time. We lived our life, and posted our posts, and the phone very rarely rang with people calling to see how things were going. Because everyone already knew. And when we made these calls ourselves, we often found that we had no new stories to tell, and our charming anecdotes and breathless adventures were met with, "Yeah, I read that on the blog." So where it was originally intended to save us time in those early days from recounting our status to our various interested friends and relatives, it served over time to displace actual connections with the people we ostensibly care about. So there's that.

And then beyond that, our kids are now not so young anymore, and where it was reasonable for us to invade their privacy when they were adorable, fat-cheeked babies and toddlers, it is becoming less so as they grow into kids with real self-awareness and active social lives. I think they deserve their privacy as much as anybody, at least within the four walls of our own house.

And so after eight years, we have decided to make our blog private, and to take our lives out of the public sphere, and go back to doing things and having adventures that nobody knows about but us, and to return our personal anecdotes to those we can communicate in a conversation, with real laughter, and the sounds of voices interacting rather than one voice broadcasting. We have enjoyed sharing these stories with you, and we have been gratified and flattered at the positive reception our blog received. But it's time to sign off.

We will see you later, and talk to you soon.

The Long Family