Who Do We Thank For All This?

Sometimes I listen to conversations people have including those I am participating in and I think about how easy it is for us to forget to be grateful for what we have.

It is one of those lessons that I have learned from parenting. It is something that comes from reminding my children about the importance of gratitude and appreciating the virtual cornucopia of gifts we take for granted.

You could look at the photo of the breakfast buffet above and make it a simple comment about being grateful that we have the ability to go eat at something like that every so often or you could extend it further and be grateful for living in a place where we have the opportunity to do that.

We aren’t at war here. There is no one shooting at us or trying to blow up the restaurants we occasionally go to. We are healthy and we aren’t homeless.

Those aren’t just little things, they are big things.

Who Do We Thank For All This?

My daughter recently asked me if I started blogging and I had to laugh. I told her I wished that I had because it would mean that I had given the world something special and because it might mean that I could retire now.

She told me she couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t blogging and I smiled because I started before she was born. Granted it was only a few months but either way it is true.

Ten years.

It has been ten years now that I have been chronicling the lives of the family, writing stories and just enjoying myself in the blogosphere.

I have been around long enough to who have been there at the start of the brand ambassadorships for parent bloggers and to have seen multiple evolutions within blogging.

It is kind of funny to think about how the more things change the more they stay the same. We still have the same conversations about comments, growing readership and monetizing our blogs that we have always had.

There are still concerns and complaints about this and that but I can see some things have come around. There was a bunch of effort to try to build community among the dad bloggers.

It was why I spent a lot of time writing posts like 2010 Is Still the Year Of The Daddy Blogger because I figured eventually it might sink in and maybe something would come from it.

I remember trying to link to a bunch of the guys with a weekly post called The Festival Of The Fathers because I hoped that might generate something but I never got as much traction as I hoped to.

The funny thing about blogging is that sometimes it can feel like we are doing this all alone, in some sort of vacuum but if you look at things you sometimes realize you aren’t alone and never were.

That truth was reiterated for me when I took another look at comments in The Daddy Blogger Community post on the old blog.

Familiar names and faces help to remind me that there were lots of us out here doing our thing and many are still around.

I don’t want to be a mommy blogger because I love being part of that dad blogger community. It has grown exponentially and you can see ample evidence that it is going to continue.

Who Do We Thank For All This?

I am lucky for many reasons one of them is I am not one of those people who talks about bad fathers. My father and grandfathers were good men and good fathers.

None of them deserve special praise for being good fathers because they did what fathers are supposed to do. As my role models I saw firsthand what is required of being a father and like them I don’t ask for any praise for being a parent.

This is not the humblebrag or a request for anyone to thank me for looking out for my family. It is like the whole babysitting commentary- fathers don’t do that and I don’t want to be thanked for doing what every dad should do.

But at the same time I have to thank my dad and grandfathers for making sure I didn’t have to be told what to do and that I knew to do it.

Circling back around what I am saying is I understand I didn’t get all I have solely through my own efforts. Yeah, I got a lot because I worked for it but I didn’t build my house or create the Internet. I didn’t grow my own food, sew my own clothes or build my car.

Nor did I create this blogosphere that has given so much to me.

I am grateful to those who came before and those who came after. I am grateful to those who walked the road with me and those who might have gone alongside me.

I know it can sound hokey, but it really does take a village.