The direction of this blog

I've been pondering lately the direction this blog should be going. Historically, it has no one topic, but has tended toward reflections on life. A bit is just updates, a bit is opinion, and a bit is about cooking or other housewifely things, but the largest label is "Thoughts." I think that is what most of my oldest readers expect from me -- particularly the ones who followed me over from Enchiridion and Sniffles Predominating.

However, the reason I branched out from Enchiridion, while keeping the old blog going (something I haven't been doing well lately, but hope to get back to) was to have a blog without a set topic, so that I could talk about whatever I wanted to. So that I wouldn't always be writing blog posts in my head that never saw the light of day because I had nowhere to put them.

The trouble is, now the blog is threatened by being taken over almost completely by baby stuff, at least for awhile. I'm only really reading baby blogs most of the time, and I find myself wanting to address topics like breastfeeding and cloth diapering. Yet I am quite aware that some of my oldest readers, especially guys who showed up for the poetry, are not the least bit interested in diapers. I don't want them to be saying, "Darn, such a nice blog and now it's taken over by stuff that doesn't interest me." However, a lot of new readers are more interested in baby stuff, and so are all the family members who read this. I've already gotten one comment asking about diapers.

I'm torn. How much baby stuff is too much? And, while I'm at it, how personal is too personal? I debated putting up my birth story for a long time, because it is rather personal and detailed ... hence the warning. If I continue to write on that level, will I have a lot of people skipping over a lot of posts?

One thing I'm definitely going to do is be careful about my labels, making sure to label each post so that you can click on the labels that interest you and only get what you're interested in. If Blogger supported it, I'd probably separate my whole blog into tabs like I've seen people do. But even with plain labels, it should be fairly simple to sort things out. Unfortunately you can't filter out one kind of label (as I've often wanted to do on those baby blogs: there's no label for "everything except reviews, giveaways, and memes"), but I don't have a ton of labels, so it's not completely impractical for someone to read all my labels in turn. Still, that is a lot to ask.

What is your opinion? Please take a moment to comment and tell me what kinds of posts you enjoy most, and what you'd like to see less of. I only partially blog for myself, you know -- I'd just get a journal otherwise! I think you'd better know that I have one post already written about diapers, one half written about baby sleep, and several in my head about breastfeeding, nursing in public, and my parenting choices. If you tell me you want baby stuff, you're going to get it!