So here is an interesting parenting situation.
I know we live in a society of crazy people. Some people say that they aren't even going to have children because they don't want to subject them to the sick & twisted ways of the world. I know when it comes to a mothers stand point, I would do anything to protect & ensure the safety of my child. But where is the line between being educated & cautious & being paranoid, living in fear?

These thoughts were sparked by another mother who had the concern of posting pictures of her children on her blog, "because you never know who may get a hold of them". At first my reaction was, "What's that supposed to mean? Logan is six weeks old! Who's going to do what with his baby pictures"? I am well aware of the dangers of the internet, especially when it comes to contact with other people. However, I thought that it mostly pertained to older kids & teens in chat rooms & profile sites like MySpace. We've all seen the Dateline NBC series where they catch pedophiles contacting kids for less than innocent meetings.

The whole reason I started blogging was because I was at home on early maternity leave without a car in the middle of winter. My brain was starting to rot with the ridiculous daytime TV crap that I was subjected to watching. I was keeping family members hostage on the phone, racking up large phone bills. I was also having a hard time writing in the little leather back journal that we bought shortly after we discovered that I was pregnant. One of Bill's high school friends has a blog about his biking hobby. I thought it was pretty cool & decided to start one for myself. I could be creative, have a place to express myself & a record of my first pregnancy that I could share with my family. I was completely unaware of the fact that other people would want to read it (until my first comment & it came from someone other than my family. I thought it was cool though) & the large group of other blogging moms. It is awesome to be able to connect with other women across the world in our shared experiences of pregnancy & motherhood.

So, this comment haunted me all day. Seriously. During Logan's bath, tummy time, singing various Bob Marley songs. It was starting to bug me that I couldn't focus on having fun & wondering if I was being ignorant & placing my family in danger. Initially I wasn't going to post this as a topic of the day & rather send out a group email to all of the other moms asking them what they thought, because we're all posting baby pictures. Then I realized that I have too much to say about it.

I did some research & found some pretty disturbing stuff. I won't link to what I found, but all you have to do is a Google search on "dangers of posting baby pictures". This really freaked me out. There are weirdos that collect baby pictures. Then I found this article at Blogging Mommies. There is a paragraph about a mom sharing her life experiences & pictures of her twins. This mom soon discovered that someone had been stealing her stories AND pictures of her boys, claiming them as her own. Now not only was I really freaked out, I was totally freaked out. I started thinking about all of the pictures I had posted & the link to the photobucket album that I just put up.

I looked through all of the other moms blogs to see who else had pictures & links to their family photo albums. Everyone does. I must have looked through at least 100 of them, no joke. I didn't want to take our pictures down because that really defeats the purpose of what I'm doing. I enjoy sharing my life with Logan with everyone. I also don't want to be paranoid. This is something that I learned after 9/11 living in Vegas. The entire city relies heavily on tourism. After 9/11, Vegas was a ghost town. Lay offs started happening like crazy. The chiropractic office that I was working in was loosing tons of patients because they were loosing their jobs at casinos & various other places. Thus our (& my) income was decreasing. It was a terrible chain reaction of events. I want to be able to enjoy the technological advances of today without fear. I feel that if I don't, "the terrorists have won", if you will.

After much thought & consideration I decided that we do need some protection without altering my efforts. I noticed that many moms have copyrights. When I first saw this weeks & weeks ago, I thought it was pretty funny. Why would I need to copyright my life about explosive diapers, projectile vomit & 2 am screaming? Well, now I see why. So I've placed a copyright on the blog. Hopefully this is enough protection, because if I ever find that someone stole our pictures of Logan, I will undoubtedly become more crazy than that person & I swear to God, I will devote my life to becoming an internet genius & hunt them down. At least at this point I feel more educated & I'm still comfortable sharing our life. Now I can go back to singing Bob Marley's "Three little birds" with Logan & have fun again.