[tap tap tap] Is This Thing On?

Somehow, almost four years have passed since I last published a thought here.  My epic car-buying road trip story deserves a conclusion, which I will provide sometime soon.   My reasons for returning to this format, however, have less to do with wanting to wrap up the loose threads of that story and more to do with preserving for my own future enjoyment these last few years of  parenting a non-adult child.

I get a kick out of looking through my old blog posts, which cover almost ten years.  Many of those posts concern current events and other things that seemed interesting at the time but are perhaps less so now.   The items I find myself returning to with a purpose are the stories of the kids and their activities.  Michael has three and a half years left of high school, and Kelly has two and a half years left of undergraduate university life.  Over that time,  Michael will have numerous adventures with friends if his first six months of high school are any indication, plus a lot of baseball.  Kelly will have a year abroad in Spain, plus graduation and whatever follows it.  My future self demands that these things be chronicled, to remind my empty-nest self of what life was like these exciting days.

Regrettably, stepping away from the blog has left a large void in our family's online diary.  In that time, Kelly powered triumphantly through high school and began her studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, just like dear old mom and dad.  Michael worked his way through middle school and perhaps the defining feature of these days, four amazing seasons of youth baseball.  Memories of these days now mostly reside in our Facebook timelines.  Of late, however, I have found myself wanting to return to the longer-form, more self-indulgent blog format where I can tell stories of Kelly's studies and travels and Michael's social life and baseball games.

Even if I'm the only person to read these accounts, I will be glad I wrote them.