3 years of The Voyage

I wrote my first post on January 16, 2006. I'm surprised and proud to have stuck to this blogging game for so long when I was never a diarist or much of a writer.

My aims for doing this have been to have a record of our lives and my children's development though I have tended to focus much more on Duncan recently and I rarely now write about our home-education pursuits, except for learning through living. I have changed my layout to display all my favourite blogs, not just those with a disability/autism/home-education/science theme. It's easier to keep up with new posts and hopefully, others reading here might sometimes have a look at something new.

Blogging has been a great way to connect with people and learn from them. I've met some in Real Life and some have become true, close online only friends.

Obviously, I want to keep increasing the numbers of people who read what I go to the bother of writing, and I have received more visitors with each passing year which must be good. OK they are still shitty numbers compared to the bigger blogs. I'm hardy going to change the world with this! Like most of us blogger types, I enjoy an occasional fix of comment crack which some good people have been kind enough to supply.

The biggest surprise and highlight of my year as a blogger was to win an award at the Irish Blogger Awards for Best Specialist Blog. Even had I not won, that was a fantastic experience and was the first time I got to meet some very friendly, funny, welcoming and supportive people and later, it was lovely to join some of these people in contributing a chapter to the Homepages book.

As always I have loved the energy, vision, honesty and power in the efforts of those in the disability/autism blogging communities (you know what section of this I mean) to tackle discrimination, delusion and to improve the lives of people like Duncan.

I hope that in some small way my words will seep out and possibly influence someone somewhere to think differently about autism.