Balancing Blogging and Mothering

I squinted to make sense of scattered letters through the glare on my screen.  Focused attempts at deciphering HTML became distracted by bursts of giggling from the other side of my window.  Rejoicing from finally making a text box that scrolled, I missed a small excited voice asking me to “look at me”.  Dripping hair and sopping wet footsteps ran inside to beckon me to join their mini water park complete with a blow up monkey pool.  Promising just five more minutes I shooed away wet fingers from my computer.  Next I looked up and the time for sprinklers, popsicles, and water slides … Continue reading

Homeschool Blog Focus: Brighton Park

  Brighton Park is a 2012 Circle of Moms Top 25 Homeschool blog, a Siemens Top 50 Farm Blog, and was recently featured in the Jan/Dec 2013 issue of Hobby Farm Home Magazine. Meet Katie Katie is the face behind Brighton Park.   Katie is a pediatric speech language pathologist.  Her homeschool curriculum is a hybrid of Catholic/Waldorf, or as her kids call it “Crafty Catholic”. She is a mom of five beautiful children, including twins with special needs. In addition, she is a yoga teacher, crafter, gardener, decorator, and backyard chicken keeper.  She loves inspired homeschooling and artful homemaking. You … Continue reading

Why I’m Blogging My Health

I’ve talked about “liveblogging” your health: writing openly and publicly about your health issues as they happen (or as close to “live” as possible). A writer friend of mine blogs his experiences with cancer — the good, the bad, and the ugly, no holds barred. Former Pets Blogger Courtney Mroch wrote very openly about her experiences with her cancerous “hitchhiker”. One advantage of liveblogging a health issue — or other important goings on in your life — is that lots of people can get the news quickly and easily. They can stay up to day with your progress without you … Continue reading

Dogs and Cats Who Blog

Do your pets keep a blog? Do they tweet? Do they have a Myspace page? Do they chat with other ani-pals on Facebook (or Dogbook or Catbook)? Writing for your pets can actually be a great creative exercise and imagination outlet. Think about it: you’re writing in a voice that is not your own, imagining what a pet’s daily life is like, and even interacting with other imagined animal personalities. If you’ve got a reluctant writer in the house, writing as a pet might be a good way to go. Twitter is fun for the one-liners — you have to … Continue reading

Blogging Your Health: Pros and Cons

The other day, I was thinking long and hard about blogging your health: what to say, how much detail to give, who gets to read your posts. It’s a tricky issue, to say the least. Let’s look at some positives and negatives. The advantages of blogging your health can include: Ease. Make one post/update to your social networking site of choice and all your friends get the news at the same time. It’s quick and easy — and that’s good at a time when you may not have a lot of time and energy to devote to keeping everybody updated. … Continue reading

Blogging Your Health

We live in an age of information. Sometimes, it seems harder to disconnect from phones, email, and computers than it is to stay connected! So how much (or how little) personal information and experience do you put out there? Social networking sites have made it possible for anyone and everyone to find an audience of friends, family, coworkers, and even relative strangers. Again, the question of how much do you (or don’t you) say about your everyday life is important. This sort of thing is on my mind lately in regards to health. Do you talk about your health or … Continue reading

Avoiding Internet Contention

Elder Ballard encouraged us to use the Internet as a way to spread the gospel. Many of us have started blogs that share our testimony of Jesus Christ and our feelings about the Atonement, and it’s wonderful to see so many active and faithful Latter-day Saints taking this call seriously and using the tools they’ve been given to share their beliefs. At the same time, many of those who have chosen to leave the Church or perhaps were never members are also using the Internet to share their feelings of negativity about the Church. The Internet is open to all, … Continue reading

A Year to Remember

I don’t know where it went, but this month I’m celebrating my year anniversary being a Marriage Blogger. Confessions Last year, then managing editor, Heather Long, sent out a notice asking us bloggers if we’d be interested in either changing categories or adding on to any existing ones. I saw Marriage was one she was looking to staff. I’d guest blogged there a couple of times. I was interested in challenging myself. I asked if in addition to Pets I could also be assigned to Marriage. I alternated between jubilation and panic when her answer was, “Yes.” Okay, my wish … Continue reading

Artful Blogging – Magazine Review

If you have a blog, or you’ve ever thought about starting one, you should take at look at the Artful Blogging: Visually Inspiring Online Journals magazine. I promise it will inspire your blogging and your creative impulses. The magazine talks about the importance of blogging, about how it makes you pay attention to your day and your life, about how you start noticing things you might have glance over before. Artful Blogging highlights truly creative blogs. Each blog gets a few page spread, along with color photos from their blog entries, and often the stories behind why the blogger started … Continue reading

Making Money with Your Website (2)

Did you know that you can actually make money with your website or blog? Thousands of people already do this, making enough money to “quit their day jobs” and support themselves with income earned directly on their website. How do they do it? Read on to find out some of the avenues for making money on the web. In the last article, we covered affiliate programs and selling banner space as ways to make your website generate income for you. Now we will talk about some other techniques to make owning a website very lucrative. Let us talk now about … Continue reading