Introduction

I remember hearing several times, as I took high school and college history, that we have infinitely more knowledge about the relatively small number of aristocracy, whose lives have been recorded, than we do about the billions of common men that have lived throughout history. The invention of the internet, and now more specifically the blog, has gone a long way to reverse this imbalance. Now you can read ad infinitum about people grocery shopping trips, favorite music groups, evening festivities, and bathroom habits.

Beth and I never had any big plans to start a blog. We were initially just looking for a way to send information and pictures back home while we were in Korea for the second time. Both with our eldest son's adoption, and then with the twins a few years later, large numbers of friends and family pitched in with donations and fund raisers and various forms of emotional and spiritual support. We did your best using email and phones during our first trip, but that really didn't cover things properly. So on the second trip, we started this blog and just let everybody know how to find it. It worked great, and we had a lot of fun doing it.

Now that we are back home, we're still using this blog in the same way. It is primarily about our family and friends, and for our family and friends. Fortunately for us, that is a large enough group that we have no way to effectively make this blog private. So if you're running across this blog and don't know us, feel free to browse. This is a small window into yet another "common" family in the United States. This blog deals mostly with our children, all of whom (thus far) have been adopted from South Korea, and you might be tempted to read more if that topic is of interest to you. But be warned, you are not our primary audience and you may hear as much about our children's poopy diapers as you do about international adoption.

Finally, we're going to try and build this into something a memoir of our family. (Although, "memoir" is probably too fancy a word for what this will likely become.) Neither Beth nor I have been particuliarly good about organizing photos or keeping baby books. So this blog, in the end, may be our kids best look into what we were doing and thinking as we were raising them. That means going back a few years, and filling in a few details, as we have time. I'll try to date things in conjunction with the events they cover, not necessarily the time they are written.