This is an idea that i’ve have for about a year and a half now. In the beginning, it was going to be centered around the idea of a family tree, hence the domain name. But then I realized that what I originally wanted to do was beyond my abilities, so I decided to create this blog specifically for our family.

My thinking is that we have so many people in our family from coast to coast, it’s hard to keep up with everybody and what they are doing. It seems like there is a new addition about once a year, I know we have some family members in the military, and I thought it would be nice to know whats going on with everybody.

Here is what I would like this Blog to be:

If you went somewhere cool and you want to share your experience with everyone, post it!

If you had/will have a baby, let us all know the details!

If you are planning a cruise or vacation and would like some family members to go with you, announce it! I’ll go with you!!!!!

If someone is not feeling well or something, let us know so we can keep you in our prayers.

Here is what I DON’T want this Blog to be:

Please don’t use this for a political or religious soap box… that’s what we have email for!

Please don’t say anything negative about another member, or use this Blog to gossip. (I know that nobody in our family would do that, but had to give a disclaimer!)

Please don’t post any private information here, like phone numbers, addresses or email addresses… everything posted here will be visible to the entire planet!

Give me feedback!

I’m open to any ideas or suggestions to what you think would help this be a better Blog. If you read another Blog or see one that has a feature that you would like me to add, let me know and I’ll do what I can.

As you’ll notice, there is an Instructions link at the top. I’ve done my best to make this as simple as possible because not everyone is a computer geek like me. Let me know if you have any problems, or can’t figure something out. It all should be pretty straight forward.

There is also a link at the top called Donate. As many of you know, I’ve been working for myself as a freelance web designer for the last two years. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into this site and I would appreciate it if you could show me your support. One way you can is to make a donation by clicking the Donate link. This will take you to PayPal where you can donate any amount using a credit/debit card, or your PayPal account if you have one. This Blog is a gift to the family from me, so please do not feel obligated!

The second, and more valuable, way you can show me your support is to spread the word to your extended family, in-laws, friends and co-workers about this Blog. Part of my intentions from the beginning was to use our Blog as a working model to show other people… basically like a sales tool. So if you will show this site to everyone you know that might like to have one for their family, it would help me tremendously! The great part about it is that if someone wants a Blog for their family, I can do it for no money up front. It would be set up where every member that signs up would pay a small amount, rather than one family member paying me for the site.

Have fun!

I’ve written a sample post below to show an idea of something that can be written. Don’t worry about space and/or how many words you type, there is plenty of space. Feel free to share photos, videos, links to cool stuff, whatever! The ability to leave comments on each others posts is here too. Use it however you want to! I thought we could also use this as an announcement place. For example when/if we ever have another family reunion, we could use this Blog to announce it and give everyone the details.

Thank you for participating, and I’m really looking forward to see how this gets used!

On saturday, I took Paul, Aspen and Chloe to the La Platas for a short hike. It was colder than we expected, but we still got out and went for it. Still a bunch of leftover snow from this winter up there as you can see.

Our goal was to climb this little mountain. You can see the ridge in the background of the photo above. On the left behind the tree is the summit. We got over to the saddle and started going up. About half way up to the ridge, it started hailing on us. Not wanting the kids or I to be struck by lightning, we decided to head back down.

We got to the truck, had lunch and then headed down the mountain. As we were going down, it started hailing… like a lot! The hail started getting bigger and we could almost not hear anything inside the truck. Pretty soon the whole hood of my truck was covered in white. The ground was getting covered up and looked like it had just got done snowing.

We all had a good time… especially with the hail fight we had inside the truck!

Here is what it looked like as we were heading down the mountain: