Changing the Lines I Have Drawn

About 13 months ago when I made the decision to do a little something for myself and make a place all my own and start Evolving Mommy I set a few ground rules for myself to help guide me as I floundered my way into the blogging world. While I am more than willing to share somethings there is information that I decided was better left unshared.

#1 I was not going to share where I live. I felt more comfortable without sharing every single detail with the entire universe.

#2 I was going to try to keep extended family members and friends out of Evolving Mommy's pages, because it isn't my place to share their personal lives, stories and pictures with you. Now I do share a few pictures here and there but I really work to keep a line drawn between a friendly mention or photo and sharing too much information

and lastly

#3 I was going to call my daughter Monkey and not ever refer to her by her real name. As a newish mom it made perfect sense to me to "keep my daughter safe" from all those random strangers on the Internet.

After posting over 285 posts to Evolving Mommy, starting Evolving Mommy Reviews, tweeting on twitter, and sharing videos on New Baby and Mom TV very few people know more than that I live in Colorado. I still try to leave my family and friends out of my blogging equation as much as possible and up until today I have always called my daughter Monkey on this blog.

Yes you read that right, up until today. I have been wrestling with the issues that go along with only calling your daughter by a nickname for some time now and up until recently Luke and I always came to the conclusion that we needed to keep our daughter's name safe.

Here are the issues. We rarely call our daughter Monkey anymore, it is habit to type it here because of the shear number of times I have talked about her in my various posts but I just don't feel that the nickname that fit her so perfectly as a newborn and infant fits her all that well now. I also feel like using a nickname can confuse things for visitors to Evolving Mommy, after all I could be talking about any number of things, my dog Monkey, my imaginary friend Monkey, my pet Monkey or something else entirely.

Let's be completely realistic here, we live in the Internet age and if someone really wanted to know my daughter's name by now I am sure they could have found that information. Am I really protecting her by calling her Monkey? When after taking some inventory recently I realized that her name is already out there, although not by my doing.

I talked with Luke about it, and after sharing my thoughts with him, he sees my side and agrees that there is most likely no harm in using her name in this space. My Space.

So without further adieu I would like to introduce you all to my very beautiful and intelligent (thanks for giving me a moment to let my mommy bias show through) daughter, Madeline.




So what are your thoughts on sharing personal information online? Where do you draw your line? Obviously my lines have changed a bit but I think that as I have evolved as a Mommy, and a blogger my ideas have evolved as well.