Well, Well, Well: Another Bonny Glen Birthday

This blog is three years old today. I guess that means I’m entering my senior year of blogging?

I was going to do a whole big retrospective thing, but I can see I’m not going to have time. So I think I’ll just commemorate the occasion by pulling some highlights out of the archives. Oh, but first, I wanted to mention a few changes in the sidebar. If you read Bonny Glen in a feed reader (I just typed "feader"—is that a word yet? Nope, looks like it’s just a surname) you may not have noticed the tweaking I’ve been doing. I moved all the stuff about me, my family, or this blog itself to the left sidebar, and below that are some link lists and booklists.

In the righthand sidebar I’ve added a section called "Recently Read," which is subdivided into Books (my GoodReads widget), Links, and Posts. The Links section is a widget that posts my del.icio.us links. More on that in a sec. The Posts section is my Google Reader "recently shared posts" widget. These are posts from blogs I subscribe to, posts which have particularly caught my eye.

So if you want to know what I’ve read on the web lately that I found especially thought-provoking, moving, funny, or interesting, the Recently Read links and posts section of the sidebar is where to look.

But I know most people nowadays seldom click through to the actual blog! I know I rarely do, for blogs to whose feeds I subscribe in a reader. The reader is what makes blog-reading remotely possible for me in these days of many demands on time and too much good stuff to read. There are a few blogs that are such tranquil, lovely spaces I do always click through to read "in person," but for the most part, I am glued to my Google Reader.

(Of course some of you bloggers out there don’t publish full feeds, only excerpts, so I have no choice but to click through to read your entire posts. I don’t hold that against you. When I blogged at Lilting House, ClubMom required me to publish excerpts only. They needed the page views to generate revenue; ad sales, of course, were what funded their whole MomBlog program. So I understand about blogging for income and needing those click-throughs, and I’m happy to click through and help. If you’re a for-love-not-money blogger, however, and you choose to publish full feeds to the readers instead of excerpts, thank you thank you thank you.)

Anyway, since I know many of my readers probably only click through once in a while, I’ve decided to try out daily auto-posting of my del.icio.us links. That way I can share good stuff quickly, easily, and no one has to actually click through to find out what interesting web-goodies have most recently jumped out me. Enjoy!

Back to the sidebar. Below the Recently Read bit is my big category cloud—and yes, I know my categories are something of a mess right now; when I imported Lilting House into this blog, I realized I’d used slightly different category names over there, so now I have redundancies like "Special Needs Kids" and "Special Needs Children"—doh!) and below that, some assorted tidbits including the Cybils widget. Below that comes the Tidal Learning nearcircle widget, and that’s pretty cool because it updates regulary with chunky excerpts from all the blogs in the circle.

So there you have it. There are lots of other odds and ends tucked into these old sidebars, but the Recently Read section is my favorite.

When I began blogging here three years ago, my intention was to have a central place to share answers to the questions I was getting swamped with via email—questions about my books and questions about homeschooling curricula and methods, mostly. I quickly discovered, as so many bloggers do, that this medium is wonderful for capturing family memories: the quick funny story, the poignant moment, the killer one-liner that you would never remember if you didn’t write it down. So it wasn’t long before my children took over this space: more than anything, this blog is about them. Us. Our family.

My favorite posts are the funny ones. Those are the ones I go back and reread quite often. These people really do crack me up. The woset in the cwoset thing makes me burst into giggles at random moments.  Of course "Who’s on Surp" is probably the funniest of my funny kid stories. "Ha! I surped!" is still an oft-heard triumphant exclamation around here. (Along with the aggrieved outcry, "Mom, she’s smugging again!"—as in, ‘she ‘surped my spot and is looking smug about it.’)

This post narrated one of my favorite Rose and Bean moments.

This was a pretty exciting moment.

I see I’ve been complaining about long doctor’s-office waits since 2005.

Once, just once, I served cherry cobbler for breakfast.

Sniffle. I just got all nostalgic over this "day in the life" post from March of 2005.

I answered people’s questions about writing here. 

I went crazy for strawberries.

I dazzled the world with my awesome homemaking skills.

I melted over this picture by Beanie.

I rhapsodized about quiet time.

I started the Carnival of Children’s Literature. (New one goes up tomorrow, by the way. Check it out at Wizards’ Wireless.)

I gabbed about lots of other things, but if I don’t go get ready for Mass we are going to be late and it will be all my fault and I’ll have to write another post about embarrassing moments at church. So I’ll just end this with a big THANK YOU to all of you who keep on coming to visit me here in the Bonny Glen!