Once upon a time, I kept a page on my website that showed off my niece and nephew in their younger years. Way back in 2002, when Jeremiah (now Jerry) was born, it was a good way to share photos with friends and family, and keep some good photos all in one place.
And indeed, my niece and nephew were the joy of my family, so it was a great thing to do for us, and their other fans and admirers.
I kept this up until 2009, when Facebook took over really, and all of us got lazy about taking photos. I still kept the links to the photo albums here as sort of an archival record… but then, Picasa, the web photo album that I used, was bought by Google, and none of the links worked anymore.
But really, the world has changed so much. People no longer use blogs and websites in the way that they once did. Repositories of personal photos and records went long ago to Facebook, and then to Instagram and other places. And because of how dark the world has been discovered to be, it’s also no longer cool to post photos of kids up on websites, even if they’re your relatives!
We just got back from seeing all my family, for the first time in years, in Vancouver, and my nephew is 20! A proper adult. And my niece is 16. How time flies. At the same time, it’s time to move my website to a new host, which means it’s also time to reconsider the pages and what I keep up. I can’t believe that I’ve kept a dedicated webpage to my niece and nephew on my webpage for so long, albeit with modest content. I’ve also, in the last decade or so, seen how inappropriate it is to not allow kids to grow up, by reposting photos of them when they were young, though the photo here is so cute, I will allow just this one …
So, here is a blog post to replace the ‘niece and nephew’ page, while sending out good wishes to my niece and nephew and saying what a pleasure it is to see them growing up into fine human beings.