Thank You to My Wonderful Readers!
This week I’m going to hit a major milestone since joining the Parents.com team… two million hits on my blog…. one million in just the past nine months. I feel incredibly grateful to be a part of such a wonderful team and love having the blog to share our family’s homeschool journey. Ours is certainly not the best/ideal/only way to homeschool, but I enjoy sharing how we meander through each year! My kids and I love homeschooling and we all enjoy having the blog as well. Believe me, I wouldn’t be blogging if this weren’t a family endeavor. 🙂 The kids have always been okay with all the pictures I take of our activities… Not once have they complained or asked why I’ve always got the camera at hand when we’re ready for another science experiment or are just about to play a math game. It also takes their support for all the time I spend/spent writing. It’s a family effort to get “everything else” done. (I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about — the dishes, laundry, sorting, picking things up, weeding, yard work and on and on!) They get a kick out of sharing our activities with the wider world. Sometimes I’ll share something I’ve whipped out for the kids… let’s say a grammar sheet about using apostrophes and quotation marks… and to my astonishment it’ll get thousands of hits (83,000)! Or I’ll go out with the kids to take pictures of the ice storm and that post will continue to get hits well into the summer (93,000 and counting!).
I started blogging more than a decade ago – first on a family blog and then branching off and creating the Homeschool Den in 2009. One of the best things has been getting to know some other homeschoolers through the blog… I’ve “met” homeschoolers and educators from China, Africa, Australia, Europe, South America and all through out the U.S. Each year we’ve exchanged country boxes with other families from around the world just from connections I’ve made through the blogging world. (In fact, we have a box that arrived a couple weeks ago from a family in Great Britain that I’ve been saving for the kids.) When you’ve emailed or written on Facebook, I always feel happy that you took the time to write! I try (though don’t always succeed!) to write back… but always appreciate hearing from you.
The blog has also been a joy for other reasons. I’ve chronicled my crazy ear/health problems — which wound up with six surgeries and my having to go deaf in one ear. It’s not a very common medical condition/issue, but I’ve found that writing about it is cathartic and have gotten several emails from other people enduring similar challenges. As it turns out, there are still some on-going nerve/noise issues (I’ll be going back for my post-op appointment at Johns Hopkins on Monday morning). Last October I went in for a reasonably “simple” procedure… and wound up ten months later looking like a Borg-wanna be. Here’s a picture I took a couple of days ago of the plastic button that is sitting over the titanium implant. I think they’ll take the gauze out on Monday and will remove the stitches. The plastic part will come off in a couple of months after the bone has grown back around the implant. I’ve always been a happy hearing-aid user… so now I’ll just look all the more sophisticated with this new device. And hey, it’ll be blue-tooth compatible. Nothing like being able to tune into technology straight into my head!
Anyway, I guess I felt compelled to write all this today because I haven’t been on the computer practically at all this past week. I’ve been flat on my back coping with the ear ache pain, loud noises in my ear, nerve spasms, etc. Now that I’m feeling a bit better, I’m feeling grateful for that… and for everything else in my life. I guess when the dark clouds settle in for a little while, you’re all the more appreciative of life when the sun peaks back out. You know what I mean?!!
So once again, I just want to say thank you for all of you who have tuned in to read about our adventures here at the Homeschool Den. Thank you!
