Happy Anniversary to My Blog!

Our 2006 Christmas card. Out the window you can see, thanks to some Photoshop derring-do by dear Hubby, the fallen tree of my second post.


And our big girls this fall. Mia still smiling, yet with different teeth, Nora still reaching.

It's been five years today* that I started We All Fall Down and what a great ride it has been. Thank you for visiting, my dear readers. Here are few of my favorite posts and oddities from the last five years of writing.

The Point

The girls have transformed from a four year old sprite and her babbling, near-animal toddler sister into a pair of young almost-women. Writing and sharing our family adventures and my own mothering/wifing/being foibles has been both more and less than I originally conceived - less, as I explain here, and more fun, more funny, more healing, more surprising, more connecting, more communal that I had ever hoped.

I'm #4! I'm #4! I'm #4!

Google "sodden prose." Go ahead. This totally cracks me up. I'm also on the charts for "half of life is showing up" (let me take this moment to give Woody Allen some belated thanks) and "Happy Anniversary, Dear Husband," for which I am inordinately and absurdly proud. I will take what the search engines give me.

Only The Good Die Young

Last year was a particularly brutal one and my blog both showed it and helped me through it. During May, as my uncle Phil was leaving us, I only had the energy to post a dark song and an innocent one. That year the world lost Phil, the inspiring Mary Scruggs, and my friends Katy Maguire, John McGinnis, Rachel Levin Troxell, aaaaaaaaaand Paul Mooney.

(Sorry, I have to put in that last bit. Mooney was such a funny dark cynic; he had an ongoing joke about his family never getting the fun they wanted AND having to wait to hear they weren't going to get it.

Paul: (monotone loud-speaker voice) These are the parties that won't fit on the super fun boat ride. Anderson, Smith, Harris, Bailey, AAAAAAAAAAND Mooney!)

Writing the grief was my way to remember and keep the love burning. I miss my friends. I don't seek meaning in their deaths - I refuse to sacrifice them or anyone else I have loved on the altar of my enlightenment, but I do believe I owe them living my life as well and as happily as I can.

Even with the deep losses, writing the five years have been a joy and a celebration for me and I hope a bit of pleasure or interest for you. Hopefully my words have not conveyed so much about the falling down as the getting back up again. Now, let's DANCE!!!







*That is, if you believe the chronology of the posting dates, which I kind of remember fudging because I thought, with newbie, there-must-be-rules-to-this-blogging-business tentativeness, that if a post uses the word "November," it must BE in November.