Saying "YES!"

So, there's a lot of great "yes" stories over at Five-for-Ten!  There's stories of romance, of birh, of giving in.  As one of the few dad bloggers participating, I thought I'd do something different.  I thought I'd talk about why I said yes to blogging.

When I first started surfing the blogosphere, I was angry.  Angry at Topher's biological family for not taking care of business.  Angry at DHS for not taking him out of an obviously dangerous situation.  Angry at all the feelings I was having over "just a neighborhood kid" ...

I started by searching for blogs about DHS, CPS, and more.  I found many blogs condemning CPS, including the unhappygrammy.  While I agreed with them, the system is broken, their anger just fed into mine and didn't help.  So I kept surfing.  Eventually I found some of the blogs that now make up the core of my reading:  Mothers of Brothers, First Day of the Rest of My Life, and We Are THAT Family.  These were blogs that resonated with me ... that had stories that I needed to hear, needed to read.  They were stories of life going well, of life going badly, of life ... and I was desperate for stories about life.  Like a "responsible reader", I started leaving comments on those blogs, and I got responses back. 

So ... my YES moment was brought about by Emily Mendell of Mothers of Brothers when in a response she told me that I have some great stories to tell, and that she'd be interested in reading my blog if I ever decided to start one.

I was scared.  I was gun-shy.  I stewed for bit ... and said YES, I do have stories to share!

I started my blog that afternoon.

Fast forward a few months, and Terry at First Day of the Rest of My Life posted something with a badge for "Five for Ten" which I didn't recognize.  I visited momalom.

Commit to reading their blog and commenting?  no problem.  Commit to THEIR chosen topics ... wow ... but again, the more I thought about it the more I decided that YES, that sounded like fun.

So for the last 10 days, I've said YES to Five-for-Ten, and like saying yes to blogging, I'm glad I did it!  I've read many of your blogs ... I've tried to read them all, and I will likely finish that this weekend.  I haven't mentioned Chips'n'Dips (hah ... snuck that in there!), but I've tried to write meaningful posts on the topics at hand.

Thanks for sharing your lives ... for writing on the same topics I was writing on, if only for a while, so we could share each other's points-of-view. 

Yes, I survived Five-for-Ten!  And I'll definitely be back if/when Jen and Sarah do this again.

        aka: goofdad