Happy Bloggiversary To Me!

Recently I was trying to remember when I started this blog, so I checked - and as of today, Aug 21st, I have been writing here for exactly one year! A friend of mine recently posted about why she blogs, which prompted me to consider why I do it also. The first four reasons are my original, and continuing, reasons:

1. To document our homeschooling journey, for both me and the kids to look back on.
2. To help me keep myself accountable - it helps motivate me to make sure I'm doing enough interesting/educational stuff to have something to blog about.
3. To give my family members or other critics a place to see what we are doing and to help them understand why we have decided to homeschool. (Although to my knowledge none of them have read it yet. But when the right conversation comes up, I can say: "It's in my blog, go read it, and I'll be happy to discuss it with you afterwards.")
4. To help me organize my thoughts so I can better articulate them in face-to-face conversations. Writing has always helped me clarify things for myself.

The unexpected reason I've added to that list, is the amazing connections I have begun to make in the blogging community. I love reading other blogs - for ideas, inspiration, and commiseration - and I love when people whose blogs I read, read mine. Does that make sense? You can see that my blogroll over there on the left has grown quite long - all of these are wonderful blogs, from people all over the country world with different, interesting perspectives. There are some who have similar perspectives to mine, and it is so nice to escape the physical limitations of the small town we live in, and know that there are other people like me out there somewhere, even if there aren't too many right here. Several of these people have added my blog to their blogrolls, and that is such a great feeling for me. I am blown away that people I've never met have read stuff I wrote, and then essentially told others, "Hey, I read this!" It's a lovely compliment. So to anyone reading this, I just want to say - thank you for visiting!