The End. Or Not.

I had a post scheduled to go up at 8:58 this morning. A post that had been written and rewritten and read and reread until I was satisfied.

I was announcing my retirement from blogging.

But then, as I lay in bed last night, I realized that I'm not quite ready. It's not that I CAN'T give it up, because I have been happily planning my blog retirement for several days. Which is a relief because I had read several articles that stated that if you can't imagine living without your blog then it's probably a sign that you need to and I was worried that I fell into that category.

It's just that I realized I still have things I want to write about. When discussing my impending retirement with Aaron I told him that I was pretty sure I hit my blogging prime while I was pregnant and everything had kind of gone downhill since then and I wanted to quit before I resorted to blogging about what I had for lunch that day. But then last night I realized that I was taking myself and my blog way too seriously and if I want to blog about what I had for lunch then at the very least Nikki will still read what I have to say and then comment about what she had for lunch that day and neither of us will think we are lame.

My reasons for retiring from blogging, though, were many. The most important being this one:


My time is no longer my own.

Blogging is a significant time suck, especially because blogging is more than just writing: it's being involved in a community. When it was just me and Aaron and he spent a lot of his evenings working on his laptop I didn't feel too bad about parking my behind in front of the computer and blogging and reading and involving myself.

Even when Wes was a newborn and he slept so much of the day I could still justify it.

Now, however, Wes spends a lot of the day awake. He requires so much more of me now than he did before and I am cutting out the unnecessaries to be the kind of mom I want to be.

Up until 11 last night, that included my blog. But then I realized I don't have to give it up completely. Not yet.

I cleared out the vast majority of my Google reader, keeping only family, a handful of friends, and a few inspirational blogs I can't bring myself to quit just yet. It may sound trite, but it's not you, it's me. You are fabulous and wonderful (and have you lost weight??) but I just can't keep up with it all anymore without neglecting more important things.

Posting on here will be drastically reduced. For the past year or so I have tried for daily posting during the week. And sometimes during the weekends if I had a good story to tell. I don't know if I will ever be able to devote that kind of time and effort to my blog again. Now, I may put up one post every week or two. Maybe less. I'm not sure yet since continuing my blog wasn't really part of the plan, but I am cutting my time investment to a fraction of what it was before.

I guess you could call this semi-retirement. I have other things I want to focus on right now, and maybe at some point I will be ready to just be done with blogging altogether, but that time is not now.

Not yet.