I wonder why we're doing this...

Hi there.

This being our first post, I'd like to discuss the title for a second.  For me, out and back has two meanings.

One, it is a route, a way of organizing a run or a ride that starts and finishes at the same place, following the same route twice, once out and once back.  This really makes sense for Dave and I because we're both very active and often find ourselves on these sort of adventures.  I actually don't like out and backs because they're fairly boring, something I'm learning about myself, my need to changes things up.  But, I do like the idea of noticing new things one way that maybe you didn't while going the other.  That's a great rule of life, isn't it?  Look at the same thing from two different angles and you're bound to see a new perspective.

Two, it's sort of how we met.  We had both left what we consider home for a number of years and ran into each other while back visiting, both for different reasons.  Mine, actually, would be considered more of a loop but we look at it as our ultimate physical and emotional out and back.  While on a search to find ourselves and perhaps each other, we only could once returning home again.

Moving on... having a blog with just yourself and your husband seems very arrogant to me.  It's often the same battle I have with hanging my own pictures, artistic or portrait, on our walls at home.  In a way, it's assuming that what you have to say or show is good or important enough to share with others.  Or maybe more important since you're pasting it all over the internet.

All that being said, I've been following a few blogs for a while now and I notice that it seems to fulfill various needs for everyone, the people writing them and the people reading them.  Here's a list of what I hope to accomplish with this blog of our family:

1)  Share what we're doing, feeling, thinking, and seeing with our family and friends who we don't get to see very often.  I've learned this best through my sister-in-law's blog in the wonderful way she posts pictures of my niece and nephews and writes about being a mom.  I actually feel as though I'm watching them grow up through her posts and am not so shocked when I finally see them in person and they're two feet taller than before.

2)  Chronicle my husband and I's life together.  We're not the photo album type of folks and the pictures on our walls rarely depict the stories of the days they show as well as we might with words.  I'm excited to hear his thoughts, share my own, and use this as somewhat of a digital photo album if we can and the internet doesn't crash anytime soon.

3)  Organize my own thoughts.  I used to write quite a bit.  I also used to take pictures almost every day. As we move through the years, those outlets seem to taking a back burner to just jotting down questions and quick ideas or thoughts in a notebook but never revisiting them.  I hope this will allow me to share what I think about and maybe, perhaps, even reach some conclusions on a few things even if it is just for myself.

What I worry about (this is another thing I'm discovering about myself - turns out, I can be a bit of a worrier.  Ok, fine, I cross the line into neurotic at times) is that it will become yet another bullet point on our forever growing list of things to do.  I worry that I'll stress about it more than just enjoying it as I find myself doing with so many other things.

It may end up being a journal of sorts, it may be more dramatic or more funny, it may be that this will be our only post and we'll decide, like that family google calendar we tried out for a month, that we just don't have time for anything else.  Whatever this turns out to be, I hope it's honest.  And I hope it fills some needs of ours, or yours, that we haven't yet acknowledged.