Like I said in my “Hello World!” post last week, I’ve been considering starting a new blog for a while. My old one had bad links and wasn’t relevant to the things I wanted to write about.   A friend of mine recently started a blog with some of her friends and talking to her about their experiences  made me want even more to start blogging again. Hi Megan – thanks for the unintentional push!

So last weekend I decided to go for it: I set up my new blog, worked on getting it to look like I wanted and wrote my first post.  There were moments of frustration and grumbling when the template I just spent 2 hours customizing didn’t support something I wanted to do.  And when I broke down and changed the style sheet to fix it and the page still didn’t look how I wanted it to look.  Uncle Grouchy to the rescue with the advice to do a Hard Refresh to make the browser go get the new style sheet. Oops…sorry for the slip into technobabble.  Anyway, in addition to the frustration, there were lots of “aha” moments, where it did work and I got excited about it coming together.  And when I published my first post and I wondered “Will anyone even read this?”

No one sat here next to me, watching my every move. The girls would pass through the living room, briefly ask what I was working on, peek for a moment, and then move on. Even though they didn’t really seem to pay a lot of attention or have any interest (because what tween or teen really wants to read her mom’s blog about mom stuff?) apparently they noticed all the same.

My oldest daughter asked to start her own blog yesterday.  So we have been working on setting it up. And by “we” I mean I did a new WordPress install for her and gave her a 2 minute tour of how to do stuff. Then she want off and customized it and started writing her first post. I’m really looking forward to seeing what she creates.  She likes to do art. And write short stories. She has a really fun-to-read writing style. A little quirky and very conversational.  And she has good ideas. Great vocabulary due to reading mountains of books.  Smart kid that one. I’ll share if she decides to make it public.

With two girls at the ages of 11 and 14, we have lots of challenging moments around here.  Sometimes I feel like they don’t appreciate what I do or even notice me at all. It felt pretty cool for her to want to do something like me.  And it was a good reminder that even when they’re not really watching and listening…they are.