Ten years ago today, this blog came into being. I posted my very first blog post at 4:11pm on December 3, 2014. I didn’t share it to social media. I didn’t tell anyone except probably my dad that I’d done it. I thought maybe I’d sleep on it and see if I still wanted to share it. If I didn't, I could always take it down before anyone saw it. But I woke up the next morning to texts on my phone and comments on my blog. Somehow word had gotten out, and people really liked it!

I was thrilled. 🙂

I hadn’t ever even thought about starting a blog until my dad offered to set one up for me. He’d seen me spend hours writing for literally years on end, and he had his own blog, and one day he mentioned it to me.

Up to that point, I’d done a lot of writing, but pretty much none of it was blog-style writing. I wasn’t even sure if that format interested me or if I wanted people to read anything I wrote. But then on Thanksgiving 2014, November 27, I wrote, and it wasn’t my usual writing. It was something I could turn into a blog post.

Dora had a friend over that Thanksgiving, and I’d taken up residence in the little room where Uncle Wes usually stayed. Since I didn’t have access to my computer in there, I got out a notebook and a pen, and I wrote what would become the post that lured in Eric. *plot twist*

But more on that later.

I was so excited about that little snippet of writing that I couldn’t fall asleep that Thanksgiving night, and midnight found me up writing the entirety of "The Little Angel” poem. And I had more ideas in my head, more things I could write about. It was kind of a whole new world.

I told my dad the next morning I’d take him up on his offer to set up a blog for me, and six days later, there it was, my first post.

Not that post I’d written on Thanksgiving night, but another one I’d written in the meantime. Appropriately titled “This Extraordinary Life,” just like what I’d decided to name my blog.

I posted my second post five days later, December 8. It was that original post, “From Ordinary to Extraordinary”, that I’d written on Thanksgiving evening, and it had repercussions I never expected.

Eric was at work when he saw I’d posted again, and he went straight to his truck and read the entire thing, and somehow, from that post, he just knew he wasn’t going to wait a few more months to ask me out like he’d been planning to.

He asked me out the very next evening.

I can’t think about the start of my blog without tying it to him and to the start of us, and I love that. The very first thing I wrote for my blog ended up being the thing that made him ask me out immediately.

Thank God for bravery and blog posts. And Eric. 🙂 Always Eric.

I’m not here to recommend that you start a blog post to catch a man, but goodness, it worked for me. 🙂

This blog saw me move from single to dating to married to motherhood. It came along with us to Australia and moved from house to house as we did. It started on a big clunky computer my dad gave me and now runs smartly along on a computer my brother-in-law built for me. There were years of almost complete silence, and other years where I blogged every month. It didn't share nearly all of our day-to-day life, nearly of our joys and sorrows, but it shared some. It proclaimed the news of first one little Baer, then another, then another, then another.

It has shared snippets of our life as that life has morphed and changed and become something so different from what life was when I started it.

I like my blog. I don't always know why I have it or what I should say, but I like to have it for when inspiration strikes. 🙂

Thank you, Dad, for setting it up for me. And thank you, those who read it, for being here.

I like even more the extraordinary life behind it, a life that really is just extra ordinary, but oh so special.

Thank You, God, for that life and for the words You give me. May they bring You glory.