Everyday Baby Steps

I want you all to meet, Angela, my best online friend.  Remember, it was Angela who sent me that amazing surprise?  Angela is incredible.  She works full-time from home, cares for her two children, and maintains Four blogs!  You may know her best from Unexpected Art, her positivity blog.  Take a look at the conversation I had with her to learn more about my fabulous friend, including some of her time-management secrets.  She's just fabulous!

When did you start blogging?

I started blogging just last year, in January of 2007.  I was just kind of looking for a creative outlet online.  I got into it, started blogging, and I was kind of all over the place.  I don't like to be unfocused in what I'm writing about or what I'm doing.  I hated sitting down and going I have no idea what to blog about.  I didn't want it to get too personal, but I didn't want it to be completely faceless either.  It started going in the way of crafting, then I took that out and started a whole new blog for the crafting. There were a lot of parenting blogs out there, and I wanted something unique and something that hardly anybody else was doing, so I started to hit on the positivity blog.  I was also doing a professinal blog, based on what i do in my career - SEO and link development.  I was up to three.

Tell me about your newest blog.

I've launched A Month of Stuff.  It's all about other bloggers.  I want other people to have their moment in the sun.  I'm all about stepping away from the limelight.  That's where A Month of Stuff came from.  I really just started because I wanted a creative outlet, and it's really just evolved and ballooned from there.  There are so many blogs out there that I've just kind of stumbled upon.  I"ll find this blog that's fantastic that I've never heard about before, even though I'm fairly well connected in the mom blogger community.  I want those people to have their limelight.

What is it you enjoy about blogging beyond the creative outlet?

A great thing about blogging and the fact that I have four very different blogs is they're four things that I'm very passionate about.  I'm very passionate about being a postive light in a dark world and making a positive impact.  I'm very passionate about the link development because I love what I do for a living.  The crafting has really had the most impact on my art because I'm really motivated to keep crafting and keep making things so I have something to blog about.  So all of my blogs have motivated me in my offline world, in my actual life, to keep moving in that vein.

You're really busy.  How do you manage it all?

I have to find that balance between family and face to face time with them and then my online time.  It's hard, especially when you first get into it and you really hit on something you're passionate about. You want to spend all your time doing it.  But you have to find that balance because you're either gonna get burnt out or you're gonna make those around you very unhappy.

All of my stuff is done when I can.  I've found that if I carry a notebook around with me and jot down some notes or even write a whole blog post by hand while I'm waiting in the doctor's office, it helps.  One of my favorite times to write is when I give my kids a bath.  They'l be in the bath, and I'll be sitting in the bathroom with them letting them play, and i"ll just write while they're playing.  I can sit there with my notebook and my pen and just crank some stuff out.  Then when they go to bed, I can jump back online and get it published.  I can get up with my husband who has to get up early for work.  I spend some time with him, getting him started on the right foot for the day.  Then when he walks out the door, I go jump online for a couple hours before my kids get up.  It works out really well for my family.

One more thing, how has blogging impacted your life?

It's different in mom blogger community because they understand you at a level that non-bloggers can't.  They understand getting up at three in the morning because there's a blog post that you're dying to write or because there's asocial network that you just have to check in with or you want to see what's happening in so and so's life because they've been blogging about a certain event.  I feel like I have coffee with my friends every morning even though I'm the only one in the room.  Other bloggers get that.

It has impacted my life.  It's made me feel like I can make a difference beyond my community and beyond my home, even though that's where my heart lies.  If I had to choose between the two, I'd choose my family.  There's no question.  My online life compliments my offline life. I don't have two separate lives.  They are one; they just compliment each other.

Angela really sums up what a lot of mom bloggers are feeling in such a wonderful way.  If you haven't gotten to know her, you should really go visit one of her blogs.