Hey Jakey,

This is a photo I took of you sometime last year. Kinda creepy, but kinda cool. Look at that belly!

MamaSutra asked about experiences with blogging anonymity. Is anonymity a good thing?

I started this blog the day you turned one month old, for two main reasons:

* I found that I was not attracted at all to scrapbooking. The week after we brought you home, I went down to Michael's craft store and bought like... a $100 worth of scrapbooking stuff, which if I crane my neck a bit, I can still see on the shelf, in its original Michael's bag, individual components unopened, gathering dust. I just don't have the time nor the patience. But I needed a way to put thoughts and pictures together to chronicle your being-ness, and since I'm on the computer all day anyway, and computers are what I know and love, I thought I'd give that newfangled "blog" thing a try.

* Your daddy's mom was staying with us. For weeks and weeks. I thought I would go crazy if I couldn't vent. So I vented online, blog-style, instead of spewing bile at your daddy, or hauling off and outright murdering your grandma.

I thought everything I typed here travelled out into the ether, never to be seen by anyone but me. I didn't even tell your daddy, cuz, y'know, every once in a while, he was the object of a bit of hormonal venting also. At this point, he knows that I blog, but he leaves me be. He knows that seeking out my blog would be tantamount to picking the lock on my journal, so he lets me blog in peace.

Then I got my first comment (hi, Barbara!), and I realized at least one other person checked in on me once in a while. It was empowering but scary.

I've told maybe two or three friends about my blog in the past couple of years, but have mostly shared it with online message board friends and such. Anonymous friends, if you will. I've mostly kept everything on the DL in the "real world."

I did have an incident last year where a former boss of mine found it (hi, KC!) purely by accident. He had some good advice for me: if I want to stay anonymous, don't use names of people, and don't use place names. (He found my blog when he did a search for the name of the restaurant that we had dined at together that day. Of course I blogged about it that night!)

Has even this little amount of lost anonymity changed the way I blog? You betcha. When I first started out, I flayed my soul wide open for all to see/read about. Nowadays, not so much flaying, and not so much bile.

As for weirdos, for some reason they don't scare me so much as spammers do. I guess I'm comfortable posting unlimited pics of you cuz I see so many other bloggers do it. If it wasn't so ubiquitous, I'd be hesitant to put your cute little face out there, but I'm lulled by the fact that millions of mommas and daddies did it before I ever even heard of blogging.

So yeah, in short, anonymous is good, but there's always a part of me that wants people to read me! To respond, to say, "yeah, I've been there too," or just to stop by and say "hey". A blog really is what you want it to be, and you should never do anything that makes you uncomfortable, because you want to always be able to return to your blog again and again, like an old friend, which you won't do if you feel like your anonymity comfort level has been breeched, or if you suspect that someone you'd rather not be in on it finds you.

Anyway. It's midnight. Time for Unisom and a glass of milk. Love you!