Blogging moment of crisis

Once upon a time, before I was enlightened, I kind of mocked blogs. I thought they were public diaries, journals that pre-internet you would only have read if you broke into some one's bedroom and found their personal stash of their inner most thoughts and feelings. I am NOT a person who has ever enjoyed journaling or writing in a diary for the sake of recording my own thoughts. As a teenager I was given a diary here or a journal there, and while I am completely addicted to the physical item itself, with all the pristine, unadorned pages and beautiful covers, I HATE writing in them. When I did attempt to write in them, I hated my penmanship, then I hated what I had written when I reread it a week or month or year later. WHAT DRIVEL, how pathetic I was thinking I was in love with that boy or wanting that thing I didn't get for my birthday or whatever. I thought blogs were just an invitation to have other people read that same drivel.

Then a friend started a blog because she and her family, including her twin daughters, moved to Switzerland for a year, and blogging was an easy way for her to keep all of us left stateside up to date without writing four hundred emails. This seemed like a good reason to blog. I started this blog mostly because my side of the family lives 3000 miles away and I thought that it was a great way to make my life with Cooper and the Bob etc. available to my family. This might save on all that uploading and emailing pictures to them, I thought. Nevermind that my family looked at the blog once or twice and then promptly forgot the URL or that it even exits.

Then I began reading other blogs. Great blogs. Mostly 'mommy blogs' with a few written by men or non mommy women thrown in. But the mommy blogs are the ones that grabbed my attention, and drew me in. I found BlogHer, which led to more blogs. Seriously, you could spend all freaking day reading blogs.

I found REALLY GOOD writers out there. And amazingly, people making a living blogging. There is a lot about blogging I don't know. I don't know how to make it look fancy like Mr. Lady at http://www.whiskeyinmysippycup.com/ or how to even embed that link so it is hyperlink.

Then I began reading the reports back from the BlogHer conference. And supposedly there are 35 million mommy bloggers. 35 MILLION. I suddenly feel so inadequate. I do. I am not normally a competitive person. You say "I dare you to do ___" and I say "See ya". I don't usually feel the need for external approval and am quite comfortable with who I have become in my life. And this crisis of blogging isn't really about approval, external or otherwise. I think it is about doing this the best I can. And I don't even know where to start to improve my blog. I want a fancy masthead! More pizazz on the page. I don't have a clue how one Twitters or if I even want to. I am not on facebook or myspace or any of those social networks. I don't have time. Especially since my child has decided that going to bed before 8:30 is for babies.

So I am just having a moment. I feel on the cusp of either being mediocre or getting better at this. And I hate that place. If anyone is reading this blog, and I wouldn't even know that because I don't think my sitemeter thingy is tracking anything, but if anyone DOES read this and has any suggestions about resources I could go to on how to do this better, I would appreciate the feedback.