Around the time that Zane was born Google released an ad for Gmail called ‘Dear Sophie’. It was fun and sweet and seemingly celebrated the internet. At the time I felt this was a great idea but didn’t want to use Gmail for this.

Fast forward a few years and I’m using my site to capture my thoughts. I began posting some stuff about the kids online but it felt like I was doing something wrong. They had no say in the matter.

Fast forward a few more years beyond that and I’ve finally worked out a way to create my own version of ‘Dear Sophie’. I’ve created separate journals for each of the boys and have begun writing small text messages and adding photos to each of them.

My site is written for my future online reading self. These journals are written for my boys after they’ve grown up and can understand what it took to raise them and what my hopes and thoughts for them were. I can’t wait to fill each journal.

Tricking My Brain

The final piece of all of this was using muscle memory of writing to my site, I use Drafts. Add this action, and modify the url with the following:

dayone://post?entry=[[draft]]&journal=Name_of_Journal

I’ve also gone and tweaked the appearance so that it is distinct from my Micro.blog action list.