Three Easy Steps to Blogdom.

Step 1. Watch a movie about a girl who starts a blog and ends up writing a book that gets turned into a movie. (“Julie and Julia”, a great movie, I thought.)

Up until this point I’ve never even read a blog. My only experience with them is judging bloggers as slightly arrogant and a little bit too self invested. But now I’m thinking “Hey, I could do that. I’m pretty funny and surely others think so too!”. I mean, how hard can it be to talk about yourself? I didn’t really mean that bloggers are arrogant, more like- reflective. And I don’t think they’re self invested, but rather generous to share themselves with others. Yeah, that’s much closer to what I meant. So before Scott went off to California I told him that we should start a blog when he returns.

Step 2 (in two parts). Part One. Think about how fabulous your blog will be. Come up with lots of ideas.

Scott was gone for 3 weeks, the final week of which the kids and I spent in upstate New York at my parents’ house. Then, from there we picked up Scott at the airport and went camping in Vermont with my family. Of the 16 of us, 7 were under 7 yrs old, so that was…well another story. Needless to say, I didn’t start writing right away. I did, however, see every event and conversation as potential blog material. Recipes, quotes, invention ideas, life lessons…boy this will be easy! I have so much to tell the world and they will gobble it up like bon-bons. How very excited I was!

Step 2. Part Two. Begin to panic, overanalyze, and doubt your general appeal to the masses.

I was still in Part one mode when we arrived home from our vacation. Scott set up a blog page, we came up with a name and he made the first post. Now it was my turn. Nooo problem. I’ll just wait a day or two. Ok, maybe a few more days, we wouldn’t want to bombard anyone. By now I’m starting to feel the pressure. Who’s going to care what I have to say? And having your words in print, albeit e-print, is scary. I consider myself competent with the English language but I’m no poet and certainly not as clever as I’d like. So now I’m completely frozen with fear. Oddly enough, I intend for the subject of my first post to be fear. I can imagine that after I make my post the followers start retracting their followerships. (Oooh, made up words. Another good post idea.) Fortunately my fear of being a chicken is greater than my fear of stinking and I make my first post.

Step 3. Read a young mom’s blog (making my grand total of blogs ever read, including my own, 2!) Find inspiration and encouragement again.

As I read her words I identified with her emotions and thought processes. As she shared her adventures I couldn’t help but notice that life’s gold nuggets are often found in the small things. I’m the kind of person that, although I like to talk about the small stuff in life, I am always drawn to deeper things. Emotions, fears, dreams. I probably over analyze everything, myself included. But it stems from a desire to help and connect with people. So maybe this is what it’s all about- connecting with people.
As I continue to add to this blog, I’ll do my best to not be too preachy and intense! I’ll try to be open and honest about life and all its twists and turns, and to share the little things with you. I’ll even try to be funny…if you promise to laugh. Turns out that the gap between running your mouth and typing out your thoughts is much more vast than I knew.