For more than 13 years, I’ve kept a private password-protected blog just for my family. It’s been a place to share photos of my children with my parents and siblings. We used it to document our homeschool years and even though it’s been more than 7 years since anybody in the house has been homeschooled, we still tend to refer to it as “the homeschool blog” for some reason.

It’s a place to record vacations, school and work information, missions and church stuff, health progress, holidays, special events and more. I use a very similar format to my Creative Lady blog.

I use Squarespace for this blog and for my family blog as well because I can choose to use password protection. It’s not free, but I love the privacy and I’m very familiar with how it works. I don’t want everyone in the world knowing our family’s daily routines. Alex is my most faithful reader and it’s important to him that I write our experiences down. My Mom is my other faithful reader. All my other family members are kind of hit and miss. I don’t blame them for that. It’s another website to remember and they sometimes forget the password if they haven’t visited in awhile.

I wanted to find a way to share these things in a way that was easier to access for most of our family members. I opened another private Instagram account that is strictly for family members. I also have another private account for close friends and family. Add that to my official katiethecreativelady and toytotheworld public accounts and that means I have 4 different Instagram feeds. I worried that might be confusing or overwhelming, but it’s totally easy to manage. Instagram makes it really smooth to access all of your accounts and to pick which one you want to post to. They will even let you have 5 accounts linked together. See this link for details.

Once I got that figured out, I started posting our personal pictures and memories to our family feed. It’s so easy because I just post as I go and I often use Siri to dictate the captions. I could even turn that feed into chatbooks if I wanted to simplify my memory keeping. I decided that I only want to use chatbooks for my Katie Creative Lady feed though. I love our family photobooks and want to keep those going. Now most of my family sees our posts through their regular Instagram visits. For those not on Instagram (like my son and husband), I update our private blog about once a week and copy all the photos and text straight from Instagram. It only takes a few minutes and it keeps our family documenting all in one place.

I’m not sure if this will be useful to any of my readers or not? I don’t know how many people keep a private family blog these days? But I know a lot of people use Instagram and like to share their photos with loved ones. I think it’s great to have a public account. It’s also nice to have an account where you can share things with close friends, neighbors, local groups, etc. I highly recommend keeping a private account for the purpose of documenting your everyday life. It has made my memory keeping so much easier and I have found it especially useful to document travels. My family is really happy that I am sharing more with them because of this new approach.