I have been meeting a bunch of new bloggers lately, and one of them is a fun lady named Super Mommy. In addition to posting reviews and freebies, she has also started sharing about her two kids, one of whom has autism.
For the blog hop, she is asking us to tell what our blogs are about, how we got started, and how long we have been blogging. So here goes…
I published my first blog post on January 26, 2008, so as of right now, I have been blogging for a little over 16 months, and it has been an exciting adventure. I started out just wanting a place to express my thoughts and “find myself”, and then I discovered this amazing community of mommy bloggers and parents of special needs children who want to connect with and support each other.
Tomorrow I will have been married to my husband Bob for 17 years, and we have one son, Michael, who is 7 years old and getting ready to start first grade in a regular classroom with behavioral support. We live in South Central Pennsylvania and attend a wonderful non-denominational charismatic church where I am involved in the special needs ministry.
I work part-time in the promotional products industry (anybody need any mugs or pens with their logo printed on them??) and spend the rest of my time juggling housework, errands, and sleep with being Michael’s case manager and advocate.
A rare picture of the three of us together
Our Two Kitties
Feel free to look around a bit and let me know what you think. I am always thankful for feedback on how the site looks and works for you. Here are some of the highlights (in my opinion, anyway):
Someone asked me the other day how to “follow” my blog, and I quickly realized they were referring to the Google Friend Connect widgets that are ubiquitous on Blogger blogs. My first instinct was to let them know this was a WordPress blog and suggest that they subscribe to my feed, but then I decided to do a quick search and see if it was possible to get in on the following fun.
And guess what, it is! You can add Google Friend Connect to a WordPress blog (at least a self-hosted one, which is what I have – I have no idea about a WordPress.com blog).
It was really easy too, which is always a good thing in my book; the whole process took about ten minutes.
Here’s what I had to do (disclaimer – this may be slightly different for you, but I’m just sharing how it worked for me):
Signed in with my Google ID (my Gmail username and password).
Under “Set up a new site,” selected the option for a standard website (as opposed to a Blogger blog).
Filled in the information about my site.
Downloaded the two files they provided, and then uploaded them to my site (I wasn’t sure what folder to put them in so I just put them in the main file area and it worked okay).
Configured the members widget and then pasted the code they gave me into a widget on my sidebar.
You can see what it looks like in my sidebar. It seems that if I put it in my post, the sidebar widget won’t show up, which I’m guessing has something to do with trying to run the same script in two places on the same page. Hey, I never said I actually knew anything about computers!
Of course, I had to test it out, so I joined myself and, sure enough, it shows up on my Blogger profile and on my Blogger Dashboard as a blog I am following. Pretty cool, huh?
Quite a post title, huh? So I get ready to come back and post again after a month off and find that the subscriber count on both of the blogs has gone up by about 100! I mean, I’ve seen Feedburner fluctuate before, but it usually goes down and makes you wonder what you may have done to offend 50 people all at once.
I did a little digging, and the best I can figure out is that Feedburner is now counting all the lovely people who subscribe to my FriendFeed. For a minute I thought I was more interesting when I wasn’t posting anything.
Well, June has been quite the month. Thanks to everyone who commented while I was away (I was online here and there but not as much as usual by any means). Here’s the shortened version of what I’ve been up to the last few weeks:
Started working mornings instead of afternoons. Although I’m not a big fan of getting up early, it is really nice to be done with work at 1:00 and move on to the rest of my day. (Especially since I’ll have two hours before my son gets home from camp for the next three weeks!)
Found a new therapist and talked to my doctor about the medication I have been taking for depression. I am going to be trying out a new combination of meds in an effort to find the balance between complete lethargy and a total state of panic.
Started major house decluttering, involving much moving around of furniture and getting rid of things. I have discovered Freecycle, and it is awesome! If you ever want to feel really popular, post something great on Freecycle and watch the emails pour in. I am also going to try Craigslist for a few items that may actually be worth something and see how that goes.
Took my son to a new DAN! doctor. I really liked him and we are doing some testing to see where we are at with everything. I’m waiting for them to resubmit the insurance paperwork with the correct (non-mental health) codes to make sure we will be able to afford to go back, but am hopeful that we can at least get a good picture of his nutritional/gut status and see what supplements and/or treatments he is in need of at this point.
Switched to paper for my calendar/to do list organizing. Although I liked the electronic/online things I was using, it wasn’t very convenient for sharing with my husband where we were at and what needed to be done. So I got a little weekly planner and a couple of mechanical pencils and am back to writing out a new to do list whenever the old one gets too messy.
Spent a day with my husband’s family when my nephew had a soccer tournament in the area. His team won, despite playing much of the time in pouring rain!
Here’s Michael with all his cousins at Red Robin:
And with the “young cousins” and Uncle Andrew on our cuddle chair (reclining chair and a half):
Not very exciting stuff, I know! Anyway, I’d love to hear from all of you how you are doing this summer. I got a little carried away cleaning out my Google Reader and may have deleted too many feeds, so please leave me a comment so I can make sure I am still subscribed to you.
Even with the stressful IEP meetings over and the stress of our kindergarten-year schedule coming to a close, I am still finding it hard to put together a coherent sentence. Which in turn makes it hard to turn any of the ideas swirling around in my head into something worth posting here.
So I have decided to cut myself some slack (for once!) and take a break from posting here for the next few weeks. I may still pop on to Twitter or find myself rambling and venting nonsense over at Autism Interrupted, but then again I may just take Michael to Hersheypark every day in June and never even turn on the computer!
Here’s the proof that I am in need of some serious R&R:
Your Mind is 83% Cluttered
Your mind is incredibly cluttered. You have so much going on in there, it’s hard to think straight.
Consider talking to a therapist. It’s a good idea to sort through your thoughts, if only to see which ones are worth hanging on to.
I mentioned last time I posted that I was trying out a new, cleaner layout for my blog. One of the things that I had in my sidebar for a long time is a widget for my Google Reader shared items.
These are things that I thought were worth sharing when I read them in my feeds, but I don’t really think the widget got clicked on very much. The links do show up on FriendFeed and Facebook, so at least that’s something, but I thought it might be a better idea to just share my favorite posts here once in a while.
So, besides the posts shown in the list above, here are some things that I have enjoyed lately:
How to Create a Minimalist Computer Experience from Zen Habits – some great ideas on how to clean up your computer desktop and interact more efficiently with your computer. I followed his suggestions about removing everything from my desktop except for a beautiful picture for the wallpaper and am now using Launchy to open any programs or documents I need. I love it!
What’s the best post you’ve read lately? Please share it in the comments on this post!
I have been trying to simplify things in my life lately, including changing the look and feel of this blog. I am now using the Thesis theme and have gone back to my original puzzle piece header image.
The new layout is set up with just one sidebar and a lot less clutter on the page, although I can easily change it later if I wish, since it is more of a framework than a theme, without worrying about messing up the formatting like downloading a new theme might do.
I also condensed my categories from 23 to 13 and removed a lot of the extra buttons and icons from the page. I do plan to add pages for my blogroll and social networking stuff, and I am still working on adding a three-column footer so I can tuck some general information down there. (Hey, simplifying is a process. )
It’s taken me a long time to even start trying to figure out PHP and get into my WordPress theme editor, but now I am learning about hooks and how to use them (made easier by the OpenHook plugin). One great thing about Thesis is the awesome support forums; I had a question the other day and posted it in the forum and got an answer within a couple of hours. Pretty cool!
Let me know what you think about it so far and what you think are the most important pages or other features I should add. Thanks!!
