On a frigid day in December, Leta was home for Christmas break, and a classmate was over. While we adults (and Marlo) cheered them on, the first graders played with the Xbox Kinect — an advertiser on Dooce — running in place while their avatars raced on the screen. Leta was losing, again and again. Her frustration grew and then spilled over, until the little girl was on the floor in tears.

Armstrong tried joking with Leta, then hugging her, then distracting the two children with another game that didn’t require as much coordination. Noticing that I’d been taking notes during the meltdown, Armstrong winced but didn’t ask me to stop. “It’s all fodder,” she said. “It’s all material.”

Or is it? It’s true that the most-trafficked personal bloggers appear to have few boundaries, in part because so many found their followers, and their voices, in times of crisis. Yet the most successful of the genre, the women who manage to turn this into a living, or at least part of one, pull off the neat trick of seeming to share more than they do. “Nobody reveals every piece of themselves online,” Drummond says. “It’s not really inventing a personality as much as shying away from certain subjects.”

She will casually mention the “self-diagnosed” agoraphobia that makes it an ordeal to leave the ranch, for instance, but she will not allow herself to become “a poster child” for that cause. She will talk about her husband the cowboy, and their country lifestyle, but she never mentions that he comes from a family of wealthy ranchers. And while her relationship is best known to her readers for its Harlequin-steamy romance, there are no actual sex scenes in the 40-chapter online version of the serial. “Hanky-panky is off-limits” she says. Her rule is that if she would not talk to her sister about something, she won’t write about it on her blog — and she wouldn’t dream of talking to her sister about her sex life.

Armstrong talks far more openly about, well, everything, but look closely, and even she is practicing restraint. She is circumspect about mentioning either her own or Jon’s family, who have made it clear they prefer not to be discussed on Dooce. And lately she writes far less often about her oldest daughter, Leta. In a post last summer, Armstrong explained (without actually saying so directly) that Leta was acting like a door-slamming, eye-rolling teenager — years ahead of schedule.

I think it’s a combination of reasons why I’ve started writing less about her. One, she expressed displeasure at having her picture taken several months ago, and now she actually runs out of the room when I break out a camera. Two, I didn’t expect our relationship to become so complicated so early in her life. In fact, I thought that some of what is going on in our house wasn’t going to happen for another 10 years. But here it is, and the level of complexity is not really something I want to talk about publicly. . . . For the last several months, if I have mentioned Leta here, I have most likely asked her if I could do so, even if it has been something totally innocuous. I intend to practice this going forward, so I guess maybe I am censored to some extent. Ha! Look, Leta! You’re more powerful than Verizon! AUG. 9, 2010

It is perversely fitting that the child whose birth was the catalyst for Dooce now shies away from having her life chronicled. But it’s hardly surprising. Armstrong says she has always known that babies’ tales belong to their parents, then as they grow, ownership shifts. She wishes it were otherwise — the sharing that got her through postpartum depression would sure be helpful when dealing with a moody teenager. It would also be great material. How do you keep readers coming back while also keeping things to yourself?