Day 448 - Blah Blah Blog

These statistics are over a year old, but get a load of these numbers regarding blogs from Technorati:

*There are over 70 million blogs.
*Over 120,000 new blogs are created every day.
*About 1.4 new blogs are created every second.

That's a lot of blogging!

The reason I started this blog was for three reasons: 1) So family and friends could keep up-to-date with the kids. 2) I wanted to create some sort of journal to track the development of our kids. 3) It gives me the opportunity to relax for 15-20 minutes each night to just write about poop, pee, and other bodily functions.

But in the course of writing this silly blog, what started out with a few measly hits each month has slowly grown into a steadily increasing audience. This got me thinking that a lot of people who don't know us are reading this blog. It sure isn't just friends because I can count the number of friends I have on one hand. More accurately, I can count the number of friends with the number of testicles I have: one.

The other day, I noticed I had a comment from a stranger who found a link to my blog from another site. The New York Times wrote an article about parenting blogs, and in the feedback section someone left a comment suggesting this blog. This is the closest I've come to being mentioned in the NYT if you don't count the Sunday crossword hint "_____ Baio".

I bring this up because it made me realize that although I initially thought this blog would be of no interest to anyone else except friends, family, and the occasional person who did a google search on "edamames", I might've been wrong. There's a universality to raising kids. Although we may feel we're on our own at times, there are millions of people out there going through the same joys and problems that we're experiencing every day.

So to those strangers out there reading this: welcome to my stupid, little blog. There are just two rules to reading this blog:

1) You must laugh at Crazy Grandma Ichikawa stories.
2) You MUST LAUGH at Crazy Grandma Ichikawa stories.

Oh. And I'll add one more: Please don't be creepy. Creepy strangers give me the willies.