Where I grew up, you were considered an adult at age 18, able to drink, vote and enlist in the armed forces without parental permission, among other things.
Today, my blog is an adult. :) 18 years ago tonight, after the last trick-or-treater departed and we turned out the porch light, I hit "post" on my very first entry here. 18 years and more than 2,600 published posts later (!), I am still here, still writing about pregnancy loss, infertility and childlessness -- which is why I started my blog -- but also about books, getting older, dealing with aging parents (from a distance), being an aunt and great-aunt, living in a condo, living through a pandemic -- in short, life.
The Internet, and the blogosphere, have changed dramatically over 18 years -- but there are still many of us out here, writing about and connecting over our shared experiences -- if not always in old-style blogs these days, then on Substack, on social media, through podcasts and through private communities such as the Childless Collective. The childless-not-by-choice segments of the infertility and non-parenting communities have grown by leaps and bounds. There's always room for improvement, of course! -- but the progress has been unmistakeable for those of us who have been around a while. (Long may it continue...!)
How long will I keep writing here? Who knows? I never would have imagined, 18 years ago tonight, that I'd still be here. Never say never (either way), right? Granted, my output has slowed a bit in recent years, after hitting an all-time high of 213 posts in 2021 (146 posts last year, 113 to date in 2025, including this one -- last year at this point, I reported 123, versus 146 in 2023, 163 in 2022 and 178 in 2021 -- which turned out to be my most prolific blogging year so far). But still, not too bad -- and right now, at least, I have no intentions of closing up shop.
Whether you've been here from the early days or just found this blog recently, thank you all for reading and commenting. :)
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Number of years blogging: 18
Published posts (including this one): 2,631
Average # of posts per year: 146
Average # of posts per month: 12
Page views (all time, as of yesterday): 3,608, 027 (!!). (Last year, I noted 1,959,495 -- i.e., I received as many page views this past year as I have in the previous 17!! -- clearly, something weird is going on, as I noted in this post here -- Infertile Phoenix wrote about the same phenomenon then too.)
Followers (on Blogger): 155
Past blogoversary posts here.
First blog post ever here! :)
