How to blog about your family

If there's any group of people who needed to have blogs invented, and who use them to their maximum potential, it's new parents. In fact, so useful are blogs to new parents, I think that a blog account should come pinned to baby's first nappy.

Blogs can be instantly updated, carry photos and video, are accessible to friends and family around the world. And when you've recorded all that information, they form a precious record of your baby's first years.

Much more important than that, though, is the experience of blogging for the parent who is caring for the baby as she grows. Blogging is not only therapeutic, it can be a life-line for new parents struggling with sleepless nights or toddler tantrums. I should know, because my blog has saved my sanity more than once in the five years since I started writing it.

I began blogging when my son was 18 months old. My family all live interstate or overseas and I worried that they would miss out on seeing him grow. I couldn't be bothered writing individually tailored emails or (Heaven forbid!) long hand letters, so I set up a blog. My Mum was my first reader and still my most regular commenter.

It didn't occur to me, though, that anyone would want to read it outside of proud Grannies and doting aunts. But I soon found that other parents with kids a similar age to mine were reading and commenting on my blog. I began exploring their blogs and found that, far from being alone at home, I was part of a community of parents all muddling through play groups and teething, or sharing photos of birthday parties and art work.

The day I wrote a light-hearted post about my coffee machine breaking and my search for alternative caffeine sources while wrangling a two-year-old, comments appeared from strangers with their own tales of parenthood and desperation. When I posted with the story of my daughter's traumatic and miraculous birth, a deeply personal and difficult post, the comments of love and support from friends and strangers made me cry. And when I re-read them now, four years later, they still do.

The tangibility of the online community is what has really blown me away. I feel close to people I have never met. I have met people whose lives I follow in their writing. Crises are shared, joys are remembered. My blogging audience is not large and is mostly made up of people that I already knew, but all of those people would be a little less close to me and my family if they didn't have the blog to keep them current.

By far my most avid blog reader is me. I read back over years worth of posts, remembering how I felt when I wrote them, marveling at how the kids have grown. Some of my favourite posts were things I wrote when I couldn't think of anything else, something I call '5 things'. I would write five ordinary things about what the kids are doing this week. Those posts remind me of the fleeting smiles and cute lisps that have disappeared now.

There are things I have learned about blogging, by trial and error, and from reading other parenting blogs. There are finely balanced decisions to be made. Do you use your children's real names? Should you include photos? Is the internet full of crazy people who will stalk you forever afterwards?

I have used shortened versions of my kids' names, for convenience as much as anything else. But I have friends who write about their kids using only middle names, and others who use entirely fictitious names. I don't include my children's surname in any form although I have never had any reason to suspect that anyone reading my blog had malicious intentions. 

I choose to include photos of my kids, mostly to keep my family updated on exactly how they look. But again, I know plenty of people who don't, for privacy reasons. While I'm happy to have pictures of my own children online, I carefully blur out the faces of other children who might be captured in the background, even accidentally, out of respect for their choices. It goes without saying that photos of my kids without clothes on, no matter how cute they look in the bath, are out of bounds for my blog.

There are also personal choices around which cute incidents should be recorded in a blog. Will my children want to read about this when they are older, or will it embarrass them? I usually err on the side of including it because I would like to keep a record which I think will be valuable to them later. I know other bloggers who have stopped talking about their kids once the kids are old enough to read.

Many people shy away from online writing because they assume that you need coding skills to start up a website. Blogs are some of the easiest sites to administer and many companies will provide design and hosting services for a small monthly fee.

Free services like www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com  will provide you with a quick start and a basic look, or if you want a more designed looking blog and hosted services, www.typepad.com provides that for around $10 per month.

Even if you don't feel ready to start your own blog, get onto a few websites and read what other parents are writing. You may find that they are facing the same struggles you are. Stop. Make a comment, start a conversation. Pretty soon you'll be wondering what your new friends are up to, or wanting to share your own thoughts.