The Blogging

I planned to do a post in August looking back at the first six months of my blogging experience, but I got sidetracked by a little excursion. Now that we're back from Oklahoma, here are some thoughts and observations.

My original idea was that I would post about twice a week, but knowing myself, I decided that was unrealistic and made my goal to post once a week instead. Unsurprisingly, I started out strong: eight posts in February alone! But there was a lot to write about in the beginning--all the new things about our new home, neighborhood, and city, as you can glean from the titles of those February posts. Would I be able to sustain it with any sort of consistency?

I'm pleased with my production so far. In six months, really five because I took August off for travel, I've written twenty-nine posts. As my fourth-grader could tell you, that's around five posts a month, more than my goal. I think the topics have been a good mix of exciting, possibly once-in-a-lifetime experiences (the Inauguration, the Easter Egg Roll); DC-specific activities and issues; and everyday life. The material hasn't been hard to come by, but making the time to do it is always a challenge. Sure, I'm a stay-at-home mom, so I should have hours and hours to devote to writing, right? But as stay-at-home moms of multiple children know, those hours get eaten up pretty quickly with housework, errands, activities, homework, and general kid-tending. And there are free moments when I just want to rest and don't want to put forth the mental effort and creativity it takes to write. Having that one-post-a-week goal puts just enough pressure on me to be disciplined about it but not so much that I'm constantly stressed out.

My hope in the beginning was that writing the blog would be good for me--force me to put my thoughts and memories in writing, both to flesh them out in the present and remember them in the future. So far I think it's been effective. I tend to procrastinate, but once I get started, I enjoy the process of writing about my experiences and trying to inject them with some wit and humor so they'll be interesting to other readers (as I might not do if I were just journaling for myself). I try not to get too worried about others' perception of me, which is made easier by the fact that I don't have a wide readership. I've debated whether and how often to share my posts on Facebook. I don't want to assume every friend I have wants to read everything I write, so I tend to share only those aforementioned DC-specific, possibly once-in-a-lifetime posts. I definitely get more readers for those posts, and I just assume if those readers are interested, from there they can see other posts and read as much as they want to. I often consider sharing more, but I think the fear of being annoying holds me back.

So if you've read any or all of my posts, thank you for taking the time to glimpse into my world! I do this for myself, but I do it for you too, and being able to share my experiences and thoughts with you is an honor. Here's to another six months and hopefully many more.