This is something that has always been on the back of my mind ever since arriving on the other side of infertility.

How long will I keep blogging?

I’ve wrestled with this time and time again and now I finally know what needs to happen.

I guess it has always seemed a little eerie to me that my blog is public and anyone in the whole world can read it. And people all over the world do read it. That is why I have never shared my daughters’ real names on the blog and why I try to keep our exact location off the blog.

Much of this turmoil stems from the fact that I am by nature a quiet, reserved, private person. I still marvel at the fact that God used this blog as a platform for me to be able to proclaim to the world His faithfulness through my journey through infertility. The fact I was so incredibly open and vulnerable with essentially the world as I walked that very personal journey is nothing short of a miracle in and of itself!

I never dreamed God was going to use this blog in the ways He did.

There is no way I could count the number of emails I have received from readers who stumbled across my blog and found hope in the Lord from reading my posts because they are traveling the road of infertility after me. I’ve been asked some pretty deep questions about infertility, treatments and adoption via email and when I started the blog, I never imagined it would open doors for me to minister to people from all over the world, many of whom I will most likely never meet. But my story has such a strong and very evident thread of God’s faithfulness woven through it from the very first post all the way to the end and God continues to use my story to bring glory to His Name.

Since passing over to the other side of infertility and falling fully into my role as mom with infertility completely behind me my blog – for me – has become my “scrapbook” of our life as a family of four. I enjoy going back and reading posts that I wrote years ago (about infertility and about the girls growing up) and I am so, so, so grateful that I have my children’s lives documented via my blog from birth to present day! My dream is to one day make this blog into a book format and I will have instant scrapbooks of my girls!

But – and I hope you don’t take offense to this and understand my need for a little bit of privacy after blogging publically for over 5 years now – I am just not so sure I want to continue to put pictures of my girls and write stories about them where the entire world can read.

It occurred to me recently that Little Bug is getting older and one day I hope she will want to read this blog from beginning to end. I have always been very careful to write things that she wouldn’t mind being on the internet for anyone to read. But who am I to judge that? She is her own person and what I may think is “okay” she may not want shared.

So, what exactly does all this mean for God’s Faithfulness Through Infertility?

Honestly, my first thought was to completely close God’s Faithfulness Through Infertility down. I feel my girls are too exposed and I simply want to protect them and it no longer feels “right” to have their lives exposed on a public blog. At the same time, it didn’t feel “right” to completely obliterate my story – GOD’S STORY and the work He has done in my life – from the internet. It’s a beautiful, miraculous story full of hope and I truly did not want to remove God’s Faithfulness Through Infertility from cyberspace, but I just didn’t see a way to protect them without completely closing my blog down.

So I took my thoughts and concerns to my husband and he came up with a fabulous solution that will allow me to keep God’s Faithfulness Through Infertility up and running without exposing our daughters.

I will no longer be using God’s Faithfulness Through Infertility as my scrapbook which means pictures of my girls and posts about our daily lives are no longer going to be frequently posted. This is not to say I will never post another picture of Little Bug and Sweet Pea on the blog. I know many have read my blog from the beginning and have watched the girls grow up via my blog. I will post a picture of them every so often but their pictures and posts about our every day lives will no longer be heavy content on my blog.

The main content of my blog is going to go back to it’s roots: infertility and adoption. I will still write about those topics in this space. I also plan to finish up my Learning Time posts for this year because I can’t stand to start something and not finish. (As in, post October to March and then quit posting. So I will post what we do from here until I finish the plans I’ve made for this year…which are a month behind due to our move!) I have a wide variety of topics I write about on this blog and I do plan to keep writing but just eliminate the “scrapbook posts” and frequency of posts. I haven’t decided if I will continue to blog about parenting and my next adventure: homeschooling.

Whether I closed the blog or just started posting less frequently, I’ve known for some time now that there would be big changes coming to this blog in the near future.

I do 100% of my blogging while my children are either sleeping or doing their Independent Playtime in their bedrooms. And I’d venture to say that probably 75% of my blogging is done while my children are napping in the afternoons. My children are not going to nap forever! Little Bug is nearly four and I know she has started her nap wean. She still has a daily nap and she still usually sleeps for the 2-2.5 hours. But more and more she is laying down for nap and not sleeping. One day recently I asked her why she didn’t sleep for nap just to see what she would say and she said, “Because I wasn’t sleepy!”. So, yes, her napping days are numbered I know and while we will have a “rest time” during the day where she is required to lay in her bed quietly with books or quiet toys, I know my days of complete silence to be able to blog for a couple hours during naptime is coming to a close.

I also plan to homeschool and I look at that as a new responsibility in my role as mother that is going to take up A LOT of my time. Nap/rest time will soon become my planning time for school. I know homeschooling a preschooler/kindergartener won’t necessarily take up a lot of my time (or maybe it will?) but I know as we get further and further into homeschooling and the girls grow up more and I start schooling two children instead of doing just a Learning Time with Little Bug, I am most likely going to need to carve out a lot of time to be able to prepare our lessons. And I feel like now would be a good time to go ahead and get used to not blogging during this time.

I feel very good about these decisions that I have made. It is always good to evaluate things in our lives and really make sure they are serving their purpose well and, if not, do something about it. I am happy that, with the help of my husband, we’ve come up with a way to keep the story of the work God did in our lives out there for anyone to read but to also protect our girls from having their daily lives broadcast on a public blog. It will be interesting to see the ideas of where I want to take this blog play out in the coming months and years, but I think this new focus is going to work.

I don’t think I can ever “shut down” God’s Faithfulness Through Infertility. It holds some of my deepest most intimate thoughts concerning a journey God took me on that has changed my life forever. As long as God keep using our story to bring encouragement to others walking this path, today, God’s Faithfulness Through Infertility will be right here where it has always been.

I will never grow weary of writing about infertility and, especially, adoption. While the posts won’t be nearly as often as they once were (because I can’t think that deep every day!) when God spurs something within my heart to write about infertility and/or adoption, it will end up here in this place.

I will forever be grateful for the lifelong friends God brought me through blogging which is something else that came totally unexpectedly. I never imagined I would meet people on the internet and then one day consider them some of my closest friends – but it happened, multiple times!

And now, to all my faithful readers through the years – I know there are some of you out there that have read every single post I’ve ever written – I thank you for joining me in this journey, praying for me through my darkest days and rejoicing with me as we both watched God’s perfect plan unfold in my life.

Throughout this blog, there is a tapestry of God’s faithfulness woven through every post because He is faithful. His Word is FULL of promises He has made to those who believe in Him and call Him Savior and Lord. When we are weary because of the circumstances we find ourselves in, He is there – right there in the middle of it all. Nothing is happening that takes Him by surprise. The day I learned I’d never experience pregnancy did not take Him by surprise, at all. It was just His platform to do Something More in my life, something more than I ever could have imagined on that dark day. But that is our God. He takes the brokenhearted and turns their mourning into joy. He takes something as ugly as infertility and turns it into beauty. Why? Because that is Who God is. From the beginning of creation, His plan has been to always redeem His children and bring good from bad. He promises that He has plans that will prosper us and give us hope and a future. We can’t always see that right away, but if we hang in there long enough and sit back and let God do His work, following His ways in surrender and obedience, He WILL reveal His Plan. And that plan is going to be better than anything we can imagine or plan for ourselves. That is just who God is. He is faithful.

God’s Faithfulness Through Infertility will forever proclaim God’s faithfulness to anyone who happens upon this place!

- Elaine