A very happy 10th birthday to daughter Melissa! 10 years ago today we held our first child in our arms, exhausted after a late night of labor but excited and astonished about the tiny little person that we had created. Even knowing she was coming for the past 8 months didn’t diminish the wonder. I remember looking at that baby and thinking, “Holy cow, we’re parents!” If you had told me at that point that 10 years later we would be counting down the days to baby number 8… well, I honestly don’t know how I would have reacted. 🙂
Not coincidentally, today also marks the 10-year anniversary of HeinrichFamily.com and this blog! Social media wasn’t the big deal back in 2002 that it is today, and I wanted a way to share news and pictures about our new little family. A lot can change in 10 years, and our web site was no exception. Different hosting providers, different blogging software (it’s hard to imagine I started out pasting status updates into a static HTML page!), different photo management software, site redesigns, etc. But eventually, Facebook won out and HeinrichFamily.com updates fizzled down to nothing.
Well, hopefully this year all that changes. This post is the first of those changes, being the first in over a year and the first after moving the blog to WordPress.com. I’m always eager to simplify things, and letting WordPress.com handle all the back-end blog management is one way to do that. I also plan to move the photo albums to a hosting service as well (I just haven’t decided which one, yet). Finally, the HeinrichFamily.com home page will become something of an aggregator, displaying and linking to the current statuses, posts, and pictures. Kind of like the current home page, actually, but better, and hosted as a Google Site. This provides multiple benefits: 1) it’s all free; 2) I don’t have to worry about running out of storage on the web server; 3) someone else deals with software management and hosting; and 4) it’s free. The only downside is the visual inconsistency between the different sites, but it was a challenge getting the old site to look consistent anyway. So I won’t worry about it. Besides, they’re free. I think you get the idea that I’m not keen on hosting fees. 🙂
Last but not least, I plan to expand the range of topics discussed. A lot of things have happened to us over the past decade, and I think we have some experience that could be beneficial, or at least interesting, to others. Managing a large family, homeschooling, and living with diabetes all come to mind. It also wouldn’t hurt me to start posting things I’ve learned about Oracle over on my Sentio blog, as much to help me remember them as anything. Though that may have to wait until I can get it migrated: at the moment someone else owns the “sentio” blog on WordPress.com.
When Apple announced the new iPad this month, they stated that there was a lot in store for 2012. On a personal level, I have to agree.
The Heinrich Family 