Today is the one –year anniversary of my first blog post. This is my 80^th post, which means that I have hurled my precious nuggets of fatherhood at you about 1.53 time each week. I hope that I’ve helped you hone your ducking and dodging skills.

The pages of this blog have been viewed a bit more than 6,000 times. That’s a modest number to serious bloggers, but I think it’s quite a feat to attract people to weed through 6,000 junkyards of completely useless information. It must be my charm.

Anniversaries are a time for reflection and acknowledgement. Therefore:

What (I think) I’ve done right

I’ve tried to make all of my posts worth your time. I’ve worked to make my posts substantive, amusing, and identifiable. Sorry I couldn’t make them informative as well, but I know my limits. I’ve done my best to add interesting images to break up the monotony of my tiresome words, and I’ve always responded to comments as intelligibly as I was able to at the moment.

What I’ve probably done wrong

I can’t get the hang of mentioning my blog to new people I meet within the first minute of meeting them. I am not a great self-promoter. If you don’t believe me, ask any of the people who don’t know about my books. I guess I just wasn’t raised to be the type of guy who goes around whipping out his blog in public.

Acknowledgements

My wife and my boys. This is really their blog. They write all the worthwhile material. I’m just the guy who inserts all the filler in between the good parts.

The Library of Congress. The good people at LOC have come through many times when I just didn’t have the right photograph for a post. LOC has been an invaluable resource for amusing, old (and most importantly, royalty-free) photos.

Taking a snooze on the sofa was a crude activity in the olden days. Fatherhood was probably a bit more rustic too. (Image: Joseph J. Kirkbride)

WordPress.com. WordPress may not be perfect, but it beats the hell out of trying to do this from scratch. There are limitations, but overall I think they make it ridiculously easy to do what I do here.

My fellow bloggers. I’ve met many wonderful bloggers. We share a labor of love (i.e. we don’t make any money off it). Support from these hard-working folks is the perfect tonic for those moments when you get to thinking it really would be better for everyone if you traded blogging for running a moonshine still in the back yard.

You. Your visits, comments, likes, Facebook shares, etc. keep this blog going. Otherwise, I would be scribbling lines about my family into a notebook, where they would collect dust. Because of you, these notes have a life they never would have had. Thank you. If you are new here, I invite you to dig into the archives and discover the path that has led to this moment. If you’ve been here before, welcome, old friend. I hope to entice all of you back very soon, and don’t feel shy about bringing a friend.

Exclusive behind-the-scenes photo of the making of this blog. The scotch is just a prop. I don’t use it to blog; I have to save every drop of it for when I need to do some top-shelf parenting.