A long time between blogging drinks....

This is totally what my life feels like at the moment!

I guess it happens to everyone at some stage but sometime around March I fell off the blogging band wagon!

Life has just been crazy for the last few months and, although I keep thinking 'of I should blog about that', I just haven't had time.

But I'm back now and here, in no particular order, are my excuses.

- We went on holiday to Lord Howe Island. It is the most beautiful place in the world. There was a cyclone while we were there. I'll do a whole blog on our crazy holiday so stay tuned.

- We renovated our kitchen. This was a bit of a comedy of errors where pretty much everything went wrong but the end result is amazing. I'll post pics soon.

- Our local Council is being difficult about the lease of the building where my son goes to preschool. I'm sure I'll have more to say about this. For the moment I'll leave it at... "You mess with the kids, you mess with the Mummy!"

- I have a new client and we have been getting settled in. I write blogs for small businesses and, although I REALLY love it, there is always a bit of a process at the beginning while we work out how we work together, I get used to their voice etc.

- I'm doing a musical. It doesn't fit in to my life, I really don't have time and I am generally grossly under prepared at rehearsal but I love it and I figure that I'm never going to find 6 spare hours a week unless I commit to something and am forced to!

But I am determined not to be one of those people who blog for a while and then stop. I love writing and I love the way it forces me to stop and actually think about my life!

There you go... the blogging equivalent of of 'the dog ate my homework'.

Do you struggle to blog regularly?  

    

How do you find the time?

Some of my favourite bloggers have written some amazing posts over the last few weeks and I have no idea how!

Christmas, New Year, an 18th birthday, a 4th birthday, a trip away and two small kids out of their usual weekly routine (read preschool is on holidays) have left me with far too much to do and no where near enough time to do it.

So blogging has fallen by the wayside in the mad panic to get the urgent things done.

Don't get me wrong I love my blog and I find it incredibly satisfying to be part of the mind-boggling blogging community but there are only so many hours in the day and it is an easy thing to put off.

So the everyone who did manage to blog/tweet/Facebook over Christmas ... seriously well done. You are amazing.

I'm determined to get back to regular posting now so watch this space. And next year I'll be ready for the craziness with some 'blog posts I scheduled earlier!'.

Happy New Year everyone.

Who's your baby?

So, I went to the park recently and I saw two boys who I immediately recognised.

One glance and a selection of stories about them and images of them flashed up from the depths of my memory.

But I couldn't place how I knew them.

Eventually I realised that they are the children of a Mum whose blog I read relatively regularly and, in fact, I don't know them at all.

I was completely intrigued by them. It was like seeing the kids of a famous person but better because I had heard the stories from their Mum so they were clearly true.

I was sorely tempted to comment on their Mum's blog and tell her what lovely kids she has. But then it occurred to me that that would be very weird because I DON'T actually know them, or her for that matter.

And that got me thinking ... is it a good thing that I recognised them and knew so much about them?

Clearly I don't feel comfortable blogging about my kids in a way that makes them recognisable. I live in fear that Wild Man's future employer will one day Google him and be able to read all about his behaviour as a three-year-old.

Other people do feel comfortable posting about their kids in a more specific way and that's entirely their decision.

There's no right and wrong here, everyone's blog and life are different and I'm in favour of the live and let live approach to these things.

But seeing these kids at the park did make me feel a little uncomfortable on their behalf.

How would they feel, knowing that this strange lady at the park knows so much about them? Quite possibly they would thrive on the attention. Maybe not. Who knows.

A.A.Milne's son, Christopher Robin, spent the rest of his life angry that his father had included him in his stories. I wonder how our children (however they are described) will feel in the future - will they read our blogs and consider them to be a lovely record of the ups and downs of motherhood, or will they feel that their privacy has been invaded?

Only time will tell, I guess.

What do you think? I'd LOVE to know. How have you come to your decisions on this and do you have any regrets?

Why Blogging Is Like Playing The Flute!

I've been thinking about this blog for months, I've got a list of post ideas a mile long in case I run out of inspiration and I agonised over the backgroud design for a depressing length of time. But now that I am actually doing it I am overwhelmed but how little I know.

I have no idea what SEO is, I love the idea of making a little bit of cash from the blog (always helpful if you are a stay at home Mum) but Adsense has rejected me (presumably because I have only been blogging for a week and have hardly any readers, and fair enough to be honest), I'm terrified of being sued, I don't really understand how to drive traffic to my blog, apparently I need to find what my niche is going to be and I need to find my blogging voice. Aaahhhhh!

I think the difficulty I'm having is that, having thought about it for such a long time, I had subconsciously been expecting blogging success immediately. I mean surely, even with all those other bloggers out there, the online readers of the world have been waiting just for me ... or not!

As you may have realised I'm not great with things that I'm not immediately successful at.

When I was about eight and having a dummy spit about learning to play the flute a very lovely family friend said "But Vic, I thought you said you wanted to learn to play the flute." I immediately answered "Nope, I said I wanted to PLAY the flute. I hate learning it!"

And it would seem that blogging is much the same.

But this time I am determined to persevere and I refuse to let myself hate the learning part. In fact I am kind of tantalised by this whole new world that I am discovering and in a strange kind of way I am enjoying learning a new skill.

I think some of the answer to my questions may lie with Nuffnang Blogopolis, a blogging conference that is being held in Sydney, and if I can just hang on until June all will become clear. There is a session about the mysterious SEO, so at least I can be sure that one of my questions will be answered!