My Blogging Journey…
Whilst nosing through my old Hotmail account the other day which I haven’t used for years I found all of my old blog entries from the olden days. Entries which I exported to email in 2006 when I got bored of writing my old blog and closed it down, thus saving the £2 per month which I had been forking out for my blog city account!
At the time it seemed like a nice idea in case I ever wanted to look back at the James that wrote from 2003 to 2006, in the midst of my 20s. So I read through some of those saved entries this week to see what thrilling insights I could gain into young (less old), single me. Seemingly I was generally quite unstructured, talked a lot of crap and posted about literally anything, with the occasional dash of humour, frequent swearing and generally acceptable standards of grammar!
I remember enjoying the blogging community, reading other people’s posts and learning a bit about different lifestyles from across the globe. I even went to a blog meet once in London. But once I started dating my lovely wife I found I had 100 things I’d rather do than spend my time writing a blog! So after 3 years I jacked it all in. The blog, not the wife.
And to be honest I never really thought about it much since that day! Then Joshua came along in 2014 and suddenly the middle of the night became a time when we would take it in turns to feed him every couple of hours whilst concurrently scrolling through Facebook and Googling things like ‘Why does my baby cry all the time?’, ‘When will my baby sleep through the night?’, ’How to run away and join the circus’, ‘Why? WHY?! HELP!!!’
Part of that Facebook scrolling led to me seeing a link to a blog in Canada called ‘Sweet Madeleine’ which had an article called ‘Here are some lies people tell you about infant sleep’. It was a really interesting read about a subject that was very close to my heart at that time!! The rest of her blog was pretty awesome too and I’ve read it ever since through the various ups and downs of her life.
Reading about people going through similar parenty stuff to me was pretty fascinating and helped me to realise that the whole world were suffering from sleepless nights, in a world of screaming, confusing, puking and crapping miniature humans.
The early stages of being a parent can be daunting (as can the middle and late stages, and every part in between!!) and it’s easy to feel like you’re in a parent bubble where no-one can help you as no-one knows what you’re going through! But when you start reading about other people’s experiences you quickly realise that everyone’s in the same boat – all trying to figure out what the hell you’re meant to do with your instructionless, ever changing bundle of joy!
I started reading a few different blogs, including the generally awesome Unmumsy Mum, each one meeting the criteria of being open, honest, non-judgemental and most of all bloody amusing! For me there’s no point taking the time to read something unless it makes you laugh or cry!
From reading these cracking blogs it made me remember how much I used to enjoy writing. So I started writing about Reading FC Women because it was something new for me and something that hardly anyone else was writing about. I enjoyed making people laugh and have been writing about women’s football for the past year now!
In the last few weeks I’ve also been writing in this little blog, as a fun way of capturing interesting moments in our parenthood journey and to connect with other parents around the world. And hopefully make people laugh a bit!!
So far I’m really enjoying it and although it’ll never quite be to the standard or popularity of loads of the awesome blogs out there it gives me something to do when my other half is at work and gives me somewhere to be a bit creative – especially given I can’t draw or paint for shit!!