Childcare, summer holidays and my neglected blog

This summer has been tough on the old blog, and it makes me realise I'm a fairweather kind of blogger. We've had a couple of holidays, and I think divorce would loom if I were to say, 'do you mind if I blog while we sip our G and Ts?'. And when not working we've been juggling childcare. My day usually goes something like: the morning I work, while daughter watches TV/plays with toys/gets frustrated with playstation; in the afternoon we go out and do something child oriented; in the evening my wife takes over and I do some more work.

This means I can just about keep up with work, and seeing the contortions other parents get themselves in to over the summer holidays, it makes me appreciate the flexibility of my job and employer. But it doesn't leave much room for anything else, and so this blog has suffered. This has been partly because I haven't had the time to write anything, but also because I haven't had the time to stay connected. I haven't looked in my Google reader for over a week now, and feel slightly nervous about doing so, like when you know you've spent too much money and don't want to look at your bank balance.

I thought I would keep the blog going better over the summer, but it has shown me you need to maintain momentum, and once you lose that the inertia required becomes considerable. I guess this demonstrates what kind of blogger I am (despite my 81% addicted to blogging score recently). It also made me wonder whether it's worth blogging over the summer, since many other people are in the same position (my aplogies, this is a northern hemisphere bias here, to Southern hemisphere bloggers it's not a downtime at all). You could write the killer blog post and it'd be lost amongst all the 'Mark all as read' clicking everyone does when they return to their bulging RSS feeds.

One last thing - despite not actually blogging for a while, I have been thinking about it. In Majorca, at a water park (which was like hell, but wet) I was mentally composing a posting while queuing for a slide. When I was at Gullivers World in Milton Keynes, I had a good idea for a posting on Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea. In the car driving to Cornwall, I put together some thoughts on digital culture, web 2.0 and the nature of expertise. Alas, never to be posted. Is there such a thing as blog angst I wonder?