How I got started blogging.

When Samuel was born (aka when my entire world turned upside down and inside out) I was seriously adrift.  I coped with this mainly by reading my favorite blogs; the first was Grace's, and I think the second big 'hit' with me was Megan's blog, and then Jen's, and it all sort of rolled from there.

Anyway, I forced myself to read those blogs to give me an anchor in an unknown world.  These were women who HAD children, children who appeared to be bathed and fed and clothed and happy, and these women were doing just fine.  Just fine.  In fact, if you compared their lives with mine they seemed to be doing quite a bit better than just fine - they owned houses, they had more than one child (Megan is expecting #3 and #4 right now, Grace has 3 and Jen has 5) and they all had something I didn't have that drew me to them.  In Grace's case, it was the easy way she wove a natural parenting style into her life, Megan seemed passionate about so many things I was exploring, like attachment parenting, and Jen's writing about her experience converting from atheism to a life of faith spoke deeply to me.  They were married, and they seemed happy with that, they took pictures of their homes that looked warm and inviting.  For the wife of a poor student whose furniture style could be aptly described as 'early attic', they were women to emulate.

And when the going got really tough there, I decided to start a blog.  To be completely honest I started a Wordpress blog first, wrote half a dozen posts and switched to Blogger, where I've been ever since.  Samuel was about four months old at the time, I remember.  Our computer was in the livingroom and I sat in front of it, every day that I could, and wrote something.  Some of the posts I never published, a lot of them I wrote and then saw the vitriol and anger oozing onto the page and deleted or edited.  I tried different writing styles over the months but eventually settled on 'honest'.  I would write it like it was, not sugar coated fluff about how I'm thrilled to tell you 50 ways to make a can of soup feed 6 people and by the way I sew our clothes.  When I wanted to write about something, I did, sometimes without a lot of positive feedback.  I wrote about modest bathing suits and whether I'd put my kids in extra-curricular activities, what daily life is like with an 11 month old.  I refused to be fake when I wrote about tantrums.  And I showed you how I hand washed our diapers, how I shopped second hand stores for children's clothing, and a dozen other things.  I didn't hide from talking about it all, for the most part.  If it was hard, well, it was hard, and this was my place to talk about how hard it was.

However, there was always this part of me that wondered if I shouldn't be more optimistic.  I remember Grace talking once about how her blog was a place where she was trying to look at the good in life, and not dwell on the negative.  I always liked that - although I'm a bit too negative a person in general to manage it well.  But here I am again, with another little baby almost at the age Samuel was at when I first realized I needed an outlet - and I'm feeling the need for an outlet again.  There's a part of me that wants to rant, but another part of me wants to try and look for that good in life that Grace talks about.  I've started keeping track on Facebook of the things I'm thankful for every day, and I really want to try and make this space a positive one as well.  There are good things in every day, I know there are.

In an effort to keep positive, to keep upbeat and happy, I'm going to keep posting those 'thankful' posts on Facebook, but I'm going to try and keep this blog as happy as I can as well.  What about you?  Do you look at the beautiful, the wonderful and the amazing every day?