600

This is my 600th post.  I should totally do something special for the occasion, but I am having one of those days.  So I shall improvise.

This was my first post on this blog.  Totally pedestrian.  Missionaries do come to this house, by the way.  Jehovah's Witnesses, though, not Mormons.  They come on a regular basis to proffer copies of The Watchtower, which in my elder years I have no interest in reading.  I think Erik scandalized the last one by answering the door shirtless.

This was the first picture to ever appear on this blog:

Little four-year-old Miss Linda.

This is little seven-year-old Miss Linda, taken back in April:

Not so little anymore.  I know, I know, total cliche, but true.  She still has that attitude that is evident in the first photo.

Yeah, I'm totally going to make this a then-and-now post.

Esther, in the first pic of her I have on this blog:

Given the nature of things, she has changed the most.  When I started this blog, she wasn't even two years old yet.  Un-potty-trained, barely talking, no hair...Still looked just like a baby.

Here she is about a week ago, giving me her serious face:

She must have wanted something, but I don't remember what.  She's going to be starting school this coming year.

Bobbie:

 This is actually from my now-defunct crochet blog (hence the sadly-oversized mittens), because she seems to have somehow escaped this blog until recently.  She's four-years-old here, in January 2007.

Here she is this past week:

She is, God help us all, on a crash course with puberty.  Her little-girl-newness has burned off.  Hasn't been that long since I talked about how great she is, so I feel fine skipping it now.

This was my first profile picture:

That photo is actually from 2006; it was just the best photo of me I had at the time.  (It's still a damned good one.)  I look so fucking young in that photo...

This is from today.  I don't think I look a whole lot different, though for some reason my hair looks really dark.  I had to take a new photo 'cause my profile pic is two years old.  Lately all photos of me have Marie in them, 'cause no one wants to look at me when they can be looking at the baby.

Now, for perhaps the biggest change of all...

This is also 2009-vintage, I think.  May of that year, if I'm remembering what I wrote on Facebook correctly.

This is from, hmm, January of this year, I believe.  Two more people!  I really, really, really didn't expect to find myself with a baby at this age; in fact I wanted to get all of my baby-havin' done before I turned 30, because my mother and I are almost 30 years apart, and as a child I always felt the generation gap keenly.  Not just between my mother and me, but between me and all the other kids...My mother was always the oldest one in the group (Erik's mom, who took this photo, is 10 years younger than my mother, for instance).  And yet, here I sit at 31 with a six-month-old, and plans to do it again eventually.  I've gotta be crazy.

Full disclosure: this post actually took two days to write.  I'm in a much better mood today (Sunday) than I was yesterday.

More looking back:
100th Post-> Politics & Looks
200th Post-> If he comes in, I'm going out
300th Post-> Every week, it is something new (a rant)
400th Post-> Yet more on the bullying thing
500th Post-> 30 Days of Truth: Day 18

Pretty easy to see how much I've picked up the pace with my blogging over the past couple of years, eh?  I'm betting it's not going to take me nearly another four years to hit 1000 posts...