Life Begins... moves on.

Five years ago with a glint in my eye and seven months in hand before I would become a father, I started to write this blog.

Today I write my last post. Not because I am quitting, but because life has moved on and it's time this blog did the same. I have to say it is a wrench to leave this blog, much more than I was expecting.

I am acknowledging that the beginning is over. Oliver will never again be that 7lb 10oz bundle that  was plopped by the midwife onto Hayley's belly, looking like a string of sausages at 6.19am one Autumn morning. Nor will he be the pre-toddler who used to love bread and refused to throw any to the ducks.. Nor even the toddler who was first on the swings on a Saturday morning because anything Daddy suggested was a great idea.

Likewise, Lucy will never again enter the world one August morning with a mop of black hair and startling blue eyes that dazzled her ecstatic parents. Nor smile at me for the first time in the half-light of dawn as I change her nappy. Nor sit contentedly on my front for as long as I had the strength to carry her in the Baby Bjorn carrier, just watching the world from under my nose, so quiet I could almost forget she was there..

But I will always be able to look back thanks to the more than  a thousand posts in this blog. And for that I am eternally thankful. And if I may say so, I quietly give myself a small pat on the back too.

The new blog will give me the freedom to post the mundane and the trivial for the eyes of my family only while hopefully saving something more interesting for publication. (We'll see!) As I already mentioned, it also means I can start to limit how much the general public reads about my children as they grow up, deserving and demanding their own privacy.

But it also allows me to open up a few more posts to contacts across the world who have taken an interest in our story so far. Of course you can choose not to bother - you may be glad not to hear for the gazillionth time how Lucy melts my heart and Oliver lights up my world - but just in case, here's what I'm going to do.

If you register on the new site (hopefully being identifiable to me!) it  will allow me to make more posts available to you should you so wish. In other words, you'll continue to see the sort of stuff on the new site that you see today on Life Begins. There's a "Register" link (under "Wordpress Waffle") in the sidebar of the new site which takes you to a registration page here.

So now, as I type, all posts but this one have been imported to their new home for continuity, and also all comments (bar the most recent as it couldn't cope with IntenseDebate).


I hesitate at the door, agonizing over this last goodbye. The first five years have been the most amazing I have experienced.. When Oliver was born, life went from good to glorious. Lucy's arrival, the icing on the cake. So I look to the future with eager anticipation and a continued sense of wonder. I hope to see you all again soon where the story will be continued.. This is, after all, only the end of the beginning. Of the opening chapter, where Life Begins...

If you would like to continue the story, vist the new site at http://tobeadad.co.uk/.