The Guilty Parent

I’m geek by accident.

No it’s true, techy things did not always light my fire and I usually saved anything harder than turning on the computer to my dad.

So to suggest that I’m geeky or even a “tech savvy” mom makes me laugh a little.

Alright… it makes me laugh out loud till I cry.

But I love phones. I’ve been a fan of the telephone since I was three years old and I have the picture to prove it! (more…)

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One thing that I learned at Blissdom was that labels aren’t always a bad thing. Since I started this writing/blogging thing that I’ve been doing, I struggled with sticking a label on it. Saying I was a blogger resulted in blank stares from people around me. Calling myself a writer took some getting used to (especially when I was being torn down and criticized by a peer) even after I’d been published in my local paper for a number of news stories and was receiving paychecks for my work.

So I’ve not always been a fan of labels. Until I met @organizersandy.

I think I was butting into a conversation between her and someone else, or I was just listening to the conversation. Either way I can’t even remember the conversation now but I remember making the comment that it bothered my husband and kids that I could tell them where something was, even buried under other things.

She called that “visual”. I liked it. I swooned a little. (Okay. A lot).

Then the topic shifted to clutter. Heh.

Should we go there? (more…)

When I first made my digital footprint online, I was still writing for a local weekly newspaper. I did feature stories, mostly human interest but one of the ones that I covered was how our local elementary school had received a grant from Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. Through that grant, the school was able to open two weeks earlier, fire up the buses and treat incoming kindergartners to a mini school day experience.

Kids got the chance to test out the cafeteria, the classrooms, libraries, familiarize themselves with all the bathrooms (very important), the gymnasium, meet their teachers, make new friends, and be transported to and from the school on the bus.

My Shorty got to have this experience while his sister, who was in Kindergarten the previous year, didn’t. I can say that he was a much more confident kid in Kindergarten than his sister was and I credit the grant that to the school received. It helped him not to fear the unknown, to see some familiar faces, and feel brave as he stepped on to the bus his first day of school.

Why am I explaining all of this to you? It’s simple. It’s all about the numbers. (more…)

You know how people accuse stay at home moms doing nothing but sitting around the house all day doing nothing but watching soap operas and eating Bon-bons?

Well… that’s me. Sorta.

Okay, a little bit. I don’t eat bon-bons. (I prefer a bowl of ice cream, yogurt, potato chips or my lunch if I haven’t had it yet).  I don’t sit ALL DAY while I’m watching, I normally fold clothes during my soap opera time or blog or research a new project.

Annnd…. I don’t watch them all. In fact, I only watch ABC and not all of them all the time. (more…)

I fell into blogging by accident. I was reading so many excellent writing blogs (and ultimately blogs by moms) that I got the blogging itch.

It was really just a way for me to share what it was like going from working status to home status to working from home status. Mostly I just wanted a platform to talk. And talk I did! (And obviously still do)

But then people and companies started contacting me to share information and post about their company, their service; their… whatever. And for the first three years I shrugged them off. But I soon realized that even if I wasn’t interested in reviewing products or services, I still needed to market myself as a writer. It’s essential to the survival of a business. No marketing equals no clients. If you’re blogging and wanting to work with companies, not knowing how to market can leave you watching other bloggers around you getting the opportunities that could be there for you too.

Any way that a blogger can learn to market themselves is a plus. I don’t know many bloggers who have a degree in marketing so most of us, I’m gathering are doing it by hit and miss.

Except, the thing about marketing yourself is that… if you don’t have the time to put into it and you don’t know what you’re doing, you can look unprofessional. (more…)