It's pretty funny. When we started planning this exchange way back in June 2005, I gave some thought to how I might document it, both for my own selfish reasons (I wanted a record of events to look back over in coming years) and also for altruistic reasons (I thought it might be nice to provide some detailed info for other exchangees in following years).

A weblog, better known as a Blog, seemed like a good idea. I'd been hearing about the use of blogs in education circles for a while now, and although I'd dabbled with blogs way back in the early days I had never really kept one on a serious, ongoing basis. As a form of online diary, it seemd a good way to share our experiences, so I went over to Blogger, signed up for a free blog and started writing.

I kept mentioning it to Donna as we went through the preparation process in the next few months. " I'll add that to the blog", I'd say. "I'll upload those pictures to the blog", I'd say.

Donna would generally just roll her eyes and ignore me. Eventually she said "Do you seriously think anybody will give a rip about any of this stuff? Nobody will ever actually read it!" And although she never really complained about me keeping a blog, she never really took it seriously either. But the blog kept growing anyway.

Then people started to say things to us. People who we hadn't ever told things to, saying things they normally wouldn't have known about. "That insurance sure sounds expensive", they'd say. Or "Hope Kate is feeling better". Or "Bet you're glad to finally have a car". And Donna would glance at me with a look of "How on earth did they know about that?" People started asking about things and commenting about things from the blogosphere, and it was becoming apparent that there were actually quite a few people regularly reading this thing.

So to all of you who check this thing out every so often, I want to say thank you. It's not often I get to say to my wife "I told you so". :-)