Parents Beware

I cannot for the life of me understand some people.  Especially pedophiles.  I don't really want to understand them.  This post is about a wake up call I've had and I hope it will serve as one for you as well.

As you will notice, on the sidebar of my blog is a live traffic feed.  It is simply something I added to my blog long ago because I just like to see where all of my readers come from.  I can see what people search for when they happen upon my blog so I know sometimes what topics are of interest to other people and other parents of special needs children.  That was the ONLY purpose I had in putting it there.  I never realized how valuable of a tool it would become.

I periodically check and see where people are coming from and noticed a couple of months ago that someone from some place had looked at a post that I had written long ago.  There wasn't much about parenting in that post.  It was more about something we had done as a family.  There were a few pictures of the girls playing in their little kiddie pool in their bathing suits and then some of us camping outside and again the kids were around the campfire in their bathing suits.  They were 3 and 6 at the time.

Each time I checked my live feed I would see that the same location had visited that same post over and over again.  I began to get creeped out that maybe they were looking at those pictures in a way I had not ever intended.  So I decided the best thing would be to delete the pictures.  I deleted them.  I expected the problem to resolve.  I went back the next day and found that someone from that same location was now looking at a picture of my children in the bathtub when they were about 4 and 1 years of age.  I again never saw anything but innocence in that picture. 

It is not enough to tell you that I feel disgusted and sick to my stomach that someone seems to be looking at my sweet innocent little girls in a way like that and that the blog I intended to use to journal is being used in ways that absolutely disgust me.

I called the police department of the town where this person is from and they seemed quite interested in the information but cannot do anything without the IP address of the person looking at the pictures and I have no idea what the IP address is.  I have removed the pictures but I am saddened that there cannot even be any innocent pictures of my kids playing in the bath together or in the kiddie pool together.  Who doesn't have and treasure those pictures of their children.

So fellow bloggers and others who have things like their facebook accounts wide open beware of what you post.  Sometimes those looking at your sweet innocent cute little children are seeing them as much more than that.