Welcome Back, Mama

I know, it’s been a while…

What can I possibly have to say after nearly 11 months of absence??  Actually, I’m being interviewed on The Mel Robbins Show on Lifestyle Talk Radio tomorrow at 11:30 am, so I thought that it was high time to think of something intelligible to write!!  If you have found me here after listening to the radio, welcome!  If you are a former reader who happened to (faithfully) check back here, welcome back!

What’s new?

Well, for one, my tiny baby turned 11 months old yesterday!  Last time I wrote he was barely 8 pounds; now he’s crawling at lightening speed and trying to stick his tongue in the electric sockets.  Madness.

I have to admit that, though I’ve been thinking of getting back into blogging quite a bit lately, I’ve been a little daunted.  I mean, where do I start?  Do I do a bullet-point catch up of the last year?  Do I write as if no time at all has passed and pick up at today?  I guess that brings me to the bigger question of why I stopped blogging last year.

That’s actually a good question, and one that I’ve been frequently asked and mull over quite a bit.  I love writing.  It’s a great outlet.  I do miss it.

First, once Charlie was born, I found myself swallowed up with a whirlpool of busyness.  One newborn is a zoo in itself, but added on top of an almost 2-year-old and a four year old, it caught me halfway to the crazy house.  Suddenly I was up till midnight folding laundry and scrambling online ordering groceries and diapers.  Taking a shower became a fantasy.  I couldn’t even sneak in a bowl of cereal without someone pulling on my pants and asking for a bite, then proclaiming that they were starving, and could I please make some scrambled eggs?  When I nursed, I’d have one on each side of me, squeezing as close as possible, and begging me to read a book, play a game, tell a story.  Right after Charlie’s birth day, Casey also suddenly found himself needing to travel much more than usual for his work.  I did hire a mommy’s helper 20 hours a week for the first 6 weeks, but even with her help, I could barely keep things caught up.  I really had no time to sit down at the computer and do anything.  And I was so tired I couldn’t have strung two words together if I tried.

Once things settled down, I kind of didn’t want to blog anymore.  I love my little circus, but at the end of the day, in between catching up with housework and personal hygiene,  I really didn’t want to sit down and write about them.  I needed a break from them.  After playing with them all day, I didn’t want to relive it online, I wanted to decompress.

This is funny, too, but I also started to miss the anonymity of blogging.  When I first started, all my readers were strangers.  Then after a while, as more family and friends started reading, I got more self-concious about my writing.  I would write a post, then end up deleting it because I knew my mother or whichever relative would be reading it, and it wasn’t something I’d want that person to comment to me later on.  Or I would miss a few days of writing and someone would call me and say, “Is everything ok?  You haven’t updated your blog in a week!”  Once my audience became partially familiar, I had to constantly edit what I wanted to write.  And that wasn’t so fun anymore.  I actually have thought of starting a totally new blog under a pen name, just for the joy of writing, without the nagging.  That’s silly, isn’t it…

So here I am.  I’m going to try and get back into the habit of writing regularly again.  I don’t know how much “Mommy” there will be all the time, but that might be more interesting anyway…  I mean, is mommyblogging still “in” these days???