Change

A few hours after posting my last post, I came to the decision to make this blog private. It has been wide open and public for about four years now and we have never had any negative experiences in all that time. I guess that I just heard one too many news stories about a child being taken from their own home in the middle of the night and it really began to weigh upon me that this blog has always been so IDENTIFYING. Anyone who wanted to, could easily figure out where we lived and who we were. The blog was way too big to ever go through and completely sanitize (527 posts on "Dumplings, Three" and 447 posts on "Three Peas in a Pod")---nearly a thousand posts!

Since moving to the "Dumplings, Three" address, I have had a site meter on the blog which allows me to see where visits originate from (country, state, and town); how long the visitor stays; where else on the blog the visitor views; and where the visitor initially clicked through to my blog from. Recently, I noticed that my blog was being picked up by "Google Images" and people began clicking through from there. The site meter allowed me to see what search words had been used and which image they had clicked on to get through to the blog. I didn't like the idea of people coming here through Google Images...that is just way too big a pond. I was comfortable when the majority of our readers were fellow adoptive parents and the other folks (outside of the adoptive community) whose blogs I had found and enjoyed following. That was the beginning of my nervousness. Then, a few days ago, I noticed we had several visitors coming from Google Images who used "Sleep over" and "Best Sleep Over Ever" as their search words. They clicked on to the blog through a picture of pajama clad Rayna and her two little friends at her birthday party. That was the deciding moment and our blog, after four years of being public, went private in a heartbeat. We are allowed to specify up to 100 readers. Only the readers we specify will have access to the blog...and the blog will no longer be accessible to any search bots (like Google Images). We averaged 75 visitors a day...many of whom never commented, so I didn't have their e-mail addresses and therefore can't send "invitations" to them to continue reading the blog. So, now, this blog is basically just accessible to family and just a few long-time readers.