I’ve been blogging the exploits of my three boys for more than four years now. When I started, the oldest two were still babies at one and three, both still in diapers and sucking pacifiers at night. No topics were too personal, too intimate, or too full of bodily fluids to be examined at length on my blog. Now that my oldest two are five and nearly seven, though, I’m coming to a point where I realize that their stories may no longer be mine to plunder in the name of blog fodder.

Part of it is the fact of Internet permanency — nothing you ever put out onto the Web really goes away, and I’m not sure they’ll appreciate that my loving descriptions of their early potty exploits will still be within Google’s vast realm by the time they hit high school. Careful as I’ve been to protect their anonymity, there’s still one link out there in searchdom that brings each of the big boys’ names (albeit indirectly) back to my blog.

Mostly, though, it’s more of a respect issue. As they’re growing up, the boys are becoming less a part of me and more fully individuals themselves. They have their own personalities, their own preferences, and their own peccadilloes. They have a vague awareness of the blog, inasmuch as it’s our desktop’s home page and they have to click through it on their way to the Pokémon site, and they’ll often stop to admire the photos of themselves I post on Flickr. They know I write stories about them, but I’ve been doing so for so much of their lives I don’t think they see anything unusual about that. But I just don’t feel like their stories are mine to tell anymore — at least, not in the intimate detail of years gone by.

Much as I want to blog the daily stories about the girls who have crushes on them, the teachers who vex them, and the antics that make me laugh, I find myself pulling back to write from a wider perspective. They still give me plenty of blog fodder as I wrestle with the various issues of modern parenting, but it seems a violation of the confidence between us for me to tell the stories that come out at the dinner table each night.

Now I know why we had that third child. It’s so I can continue to mommy-blog with impunity (and occasionally embarrassing levels of intimate detail) for at least another couple of years.

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Danielle Donders is the author of the popular blog Postcards from the Mothership. She graces us with her take on how technology impacts the parenting (and motherhood) process each Thursday in this space.