Ultimate Blog Challenge – The End

And it’s over. 30 days of writing. 30 days of posting. Well, more like 15 days of posting for me. I started late with the challenge and had to do some catching up. By the 19th of the month I was on track to post once a day.

But hey, there’s a reason this little space on the Internet is called Life Takes Over. It happens. It’s a fact of, well, Life.

I lost five days in the last part of the month to mundane important parenting responsibilities. (Feeding my kids healthy meals does take a lot of prep time and a certain amount of planning genius, especially when dealing with picky eaters.)

But here’s what I learned by taking part in the Ultimate Blog Challenge:

Five Minute Friday – Jump

Linking up with Lisa-Jo over on her site today.

It’s Five Minute Friday. The word is here. Here’s how to play:

1. Write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking.
2. Link back to Lisa-Jo’s post and invite others to join in.
3. And then, absolutely no ifs, ands or buts about it, you need to visit the person who linked up before you & encourage them in their comments. Seriously. That is, like, the rule. And the fun. And the heart of this community...

GO

The Inner Workings of a Mommy Blogger’s Mind

So I got to thinking the other day about blogging and writing and what it all means to me. I started this blog because I like to write and because I found myself talking about my kids and my life with friends (no I’m not narcissistic [well, maybe a little bit]. I do listen to my friends to) and realizing that, even though I thought I had nothing to write about and no one would find my stories interesting even if I did write them down, my stories are likely similar to every other mom with a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old, but they are from my POV. No one else comes at life from where I stand.

Enter blogging. I decided to stop boring my friends by telling them my stories and start writing them down so they could choose to read them at their leisure.

The bully in my head

Positivity is something we can cultivate. If you walk around all day telling yourself you’re no good at something or berating yourself for the way you handled a situation earlier, you are going to believe that you are no good at that thing or that you didn’t handle that situation right.

This isn’t rocket science. We all know that we should speak kindly to others and to ourselves. But how many of us really, I mean really do it?

I’m on a roll

So I wrote about not being able to write and now I can’t stop. That advice I was throwing out there? That was for my own good.

But writing when you’re embroiled in the work of motherhood can be tricky.

I set aside time to write. It rarely happens that I’m available for that appointment with myself.

I’ve tried changing the appointment. It doesn’t matter.

Unless I’m willing to forego sleep and write into the wee hours of the morning, when the sun is up (and even for a while after the sun disappears below the horizon), I belong to my children.

Five Minute Friday – Here

Linking up with Lisa-Jo over on her site today.

It’s Five Minute Friday. The word is here. Here’s how to play:

1. Write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking.
2. Link back to Lisa-Jo’s site and invite others to join in.
3. And then, absolutely no ifs, ands or buts about it, you need to visit the person who linked up before you & encourage them in their comments. Seriously. That is, like, the rule. And the fun. And the heart of this community...

GO

Ultimate Blog Challenge – The Beginning

Have you heard about the Ultimate Blogger Challenge? I hadn’t until recently. But it seems like a great way to get my butt back in gear. I have a dozen or more drafts lagging in a folder. For whatever reason, I can’t seem to polish them off and send them out into the world.

I call it “being too busy”. But that’s not a good enough excuse if writing is something you truly love. Because, if you do love to write, you’ll always find time to do it.

When I first started blogging, I used to get ideas while I was washing or drying dishes with my husband. I’d look at him imploringly and say, “I just had a great idea for a blog post. I don’t want to forget it. Would you mind if I just sat down at the computer for a few minutes to tap it out?”

And he, being the wonderfully understanding husband that he is, would say, “Of course, hon. This is your passion. You have to run with it.”

When you can’t write

If ever there was a time to write, it is now.

It is when you can’t that you must.

It is when no ideas come that you must face the screen, flex your fingers and begin.

It is when you are the most afraid of what will come that you must face your fear.

It is when you feel you have nothing to say that you have the most to say.

It is when you think yourself not good enough that you are at your best.

This is the darkest hour of a writer.

This is the moment of truth.

This is where belief is born.

Be strong. Do not falter. You are a writer. You have a story to tell.

Put fingers to keyboard. Stare down that blank screen and…

Dragged back out again

You ever feel like just writing? Just going blah blah blah blah to get something out of your head and into the world where you can face it and deal with it and have done with it once and for all? Not worrying about spelling or grammar or sentence structure, or who’s going to read it or what they will think of it or anything like that?

Family Literacy Day 2013

I’m a reader. My kids, though they can’t read yet, well, I consider them readers, too. They follow my reading. They love story time. They love books in general. They incorporate books in their play. They build towers and forts out of them. They use them for ramps for their cars. They pretend to read them. They memorize the stories I read to them and then try to pick out the words when they “read” them back to themselves. All of this warms my heart because I am a lover of books.

And when my little girl was born, one of the things I was most excited about was reading to her. Boy was I in for a disappointment.

My little girl didn’t like books. She didn’t like stories. She had no patience to sit still and listen. She did enjoy chewing on them, but not even that very much.

Thankfully, things have changed. I look back now and think that perhaps I had set the bar too high. I had expectations of sharing my beloved books and stories with her when all she wanted to do was flip pages and gum the corners to a mushy mess.

Now, we can sit for hours reading and re-reading. And her little brother? Well, maybe the bar was lower. Maybe I didn’t have time to notice and fret as much because I had an active toddler to handle, or maybe he was just the second child who fell in line because he had an example to follow. Whatever the reason, he has always seemed to love books and stories.

Take for example this book, Marlow and the Monster, that we received for review a while back. Both my kids liked the story. We had fun reading it together. And then it got put on the shelf and kind of forgotten. But my son found it a couple weeks back and that’s what we have been reading before bed every night since. He just loves it! He is full of questions and curiosity about the monster and about zombies and the little mouse who hides on each page. I think it’s fantastic that a story has resonated so strongly with my little guy that he goes back to it again and again. (I know. I know. As parents, the last thing we want to do is read the same book every night. The repetition is enough to drive you mad. But there’s a clicking point with kids and that’s why they love repetition, because they are striving for the clicking point where they get it and then they can move onto another story.)

This Sunday is the 15th anniversary of Family Literacy Day. And not that we need another reason to read, but there are a lot of activities going on around the city to get families reading (and writing). The theme this year is “15 Minutes of Fun”. Maybe we’ll check out some of the events around town.