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.

Sherry Pardy is a mom to twins, a writer, and a student working on completing her Bachelor’s degree.  On top of that she shares her personality and humor at her blog.  She is definitely one busy woman and someone I’d love to spend some time with.  I enjoyed getting to know her when we spoke on the phone a few weeks ago.  Here’s what she had to say.

When did you start blogging?

I started blogging in 2004, about when my husband and I realized that we were gonna have some problems trying to have a baby. . .  I found out that I had PCOS, and it was likely gonna pose some big issues with trying to conceive, and I came home devastated.  I didn’t know what else to do. And I started researching online and Googling, then I found this blog called Chez Miscarriage, and she was dealing with a different problem, but she was part of this very large community of women who were infertile who had started blogging because it was a cheap way to get therapy.  That’s how it started, and it’s just sort of somersaulted from there.

Why do you blog?

It is the best thing I have ever done for myself.  It’s truly saved my sanity on many, many, many occasions…Everyone’s kind of got their own set of issues, and I think that’s what kind of brings everyone together and makes this blogging thing a community is that everyone discover that even though all of our issues, whether it be political or infertility or whatever. Whatever your issues are, everyone has their own…it’s like a belly button. You look out there and you realize that you can’t be the only one.  It’s so nice to know that you’re not alone.

We have adopted the mantra in this house that the mom is the heart of any operation in the house…the mom is the nucleus of any home.  If you’re not content in the direction that your life is going, especially being a stay-at-home mom because it’s a really isolating experience, I’ve found.  Without feeling like you’re contributing to something outside your little four walls, you’re gonna go insane.  I was doing nothing, I was not contributing to anything.  My husband plays a huge role in the development of drugs that could potentially save someone’s life, and here I was thinking I was doing nothing.  And since embarking on this journey and trying to get my career off the ground, going back to school, and doing a little something for myself, that has completely changed.  It’s been really great.  We’re really in place now, I feel like.

What do you share in your blog?

I am very honest and open in my blog.  My blog is a very accurate reflection of who I am in real life.  I hide nothing.  I don’t use a fake name.  I don’t hide about where I live.  I post pictures of my kids.  And I think that comes from before I was a stay-at-home mom, I was in radio, and I was the same way.  I used my real name on the air, and I never hid from what I did.  I think that, for me, it’s really important to do that because I’ve always had some esteem issues and self-image issues.  I think as I’ve gotten older that’s really helped with those issues and kind of squelched them a little bit because I put it out there, I force myself to put it out there.  That’s what it is.  People take it, people leave it.  That’s what it is, and it seems to work.

It’s given me an outlet to talk about things that I wouldn’t necessarily voice to anybody in real life.  It’s also introduced me to one of my very best friends, who is a fellow blogger, who I met.  She lives just in the next town over.  It is my outlet.  It was my little outside my four walls of my house that makes me feel like I contribute to something outside my family.