Reflections on Blogging

Update on Us

To begin with, I just want to say how great it is that Patrick is done with summer term. He now has two weeks of vacation from school. He finished exams on Thursday and doesn't go back for fall semester until the beginning of September. Unfortunately, the pleasure of reaching this point in the year is marred a little by the fact that he has a cold. He's going through Kleenex boxes like we have a year's supply handy (though he is realizing that we don't since we need to go shopping). I am sure that my prayers are really confusing now. Up to this point, I've been saying, "Please let us have the baby in the next two weeks before Patrick goes back to school." Now, however, I'm backpeddling and saying, "Please let Patrick get better soon and then let us have the baby before Patrick goes back to school." It is times like these when I'm sure the angels are shaking their heads at me and mumbling, "Come on, lady. Praying isn't supposed to be like ordering fast food." In any case, this is just what I think would be nice (I don't want Patrick sneezing on me when I'm in labor); I have confidence that things will work out right even if my life in the next few weeks isn't "made-to-order."

Wednesday Activity

On Wednesday, Patrick and I were at a combined youth activity at the local park. The kids were playing water games, and, yes, "the kids" definitely includes Patrick. All my Beehives know him now because he attacked them all with various forms of water weaponry. I sat out with the other women.

(Sitting there with these women made me reflect that women get kind of boring: Why were all the men out there playing and the women were sitting on the sidelines commenting on how the teenage girls were afraid to get wet? I suspect that for those women who had changed, the change took place in the course of bearing children. Between pregnancy and watching toddlers, women end up sitting on the sidelines a lot during the roughhousing I imagine. This is something I'm going to have to work out because I've always had good intentions of being a fun adult and it suddenly seemed more complicated after Wednesday.)

After the activity, the bishop came up to me and said, "Keegan, you should have come out there. We could have gotten you to the hospital today."

I explained, "I can't go to the hospital today. Patrick has exams tomorrow. But can we come back and do this on Saturday?" Of course, nobody volunteered . . . unfortunately.

All Ears

While I was sitting there visiting with these women (whom I actually like a lot even though I described them as "boring"), one of the women was telling about these various blogs that she reads. I almost chimed in to say that I have a blog when another woman said, "I would never put my name out there." Considering that our name is very prominently located on our blog, I thought it was a good thing I hadn't shared that little bit of information. A third woman said, "I just don't know that I could be that interested in other people's lives." Again, I was glad I had kept silent because I check our friends' blogs and LiveJournals pretty frequently to see the latest news they've posted. The first woman explained that she doesn't blog, she just reads other people's, and the ones she reads are not personal; they tend to be writing for the sake of writing, not writing for the sake of sharing the details of their lives. As the one person who does all the things that these women would never do, I was sitting there laughing to myself and feeling a bit of a generation gap. After all, they are mothers of teenagers and a grandmother of children; we are coming from two very different worlds. Not to say that people in their generation all feel this way, but compared to my generation, I think it's safe to say that the general sentiments are divided fairly clearly, with a few mavericks on either side.

On a different note, I really enjoyed listening to the first woman share tidbits from the blogs she reads. She mentioned that one of them is called "Eavesdropping on Life" and that the woman who writes it shares different conversations she overhears. May I just say that I think that is absolutely brilliant and I wish I had thought of it. That probably partially explains why I'm sharing this conversation that I wasn't even involved in. While they were talking, they mentioned how you can get paid to blog, and I felt almost hungry to manage that feat. It's something to think about anyway. Someday I'm going to get paid to write; but first, I suppose I need to write more than on this blog once a week. *Sigh* One more thing to add to my to-do list.

1. Have a baby and learn how to take care of him.

2. Recover from having a baby.

3. Write.