Today I was nominated for my 3rd blogging award, The Blogger Recognition Award, by the deliciously witty Agatha Chocolates. Of course,  I am incredibly honored to even be noticed by someone who can combine chocolate with mystery writing in such an amusing and yummy fashion. I actually used one of her posts “chocolate tears” to test the deductive reasoning skills of myself vs my 15 year old and 3 year old…… we don’t need to talk about the outcome…..

The rules are as follows:

1. Write a post to show your award.
2. Acknowledge the blogger who nominated you.
3. Give a brief story of how you started your blog.
4. Give two pieces of advice to new bloggers.
5. Nominate 15 bloggers who deserve the award.

So….. how I started my blog……

It was actually an experiment done for my sister, who knew I always loved writing and journaling life events. She was all hyped up on this “mommy blog” thing and convinced me that my humble experiences would not only be earth shatteringly interesting to the rest of the (blogging) world….. but that I would have offers of free services and products thrown at me by companies dying for my opinion about their stuff.

I am expecting a call any day now. Aaaaaaaaaany day now……..

Hey, Kim…….

Advice to new bloggers?

1. It’s not all about YOU. I originally started writing these posts….and didn’t actively search out other bloggers. Followers trickled in, and I was always excited to see it, but didn’t initially think about following anyone else. Duh. Once I learned more about navigating word press, finding bloggers with similar and sometimes completely opposite interests, I found myself enjoying the experience so much more. I followed people, realizing I cared and wanted to know more about them, what they were going to say next. Now I feel I actually have virtual friends, blogs I follow and look for if I haven’t seen a post in a while. I want to know about that bad kid in the neighborhood who keeps sneaking into one persons house, I want to know how this other persons divorce is going to pan out, I want to know how many ways I can use cheese or chocolate to improve my life! So don’t just focus on your blog…. open yourself to the whole experience…THAT’s the fun part.

2. My second piece of advice is just to say that following a schedule didn’t work for me. I originally tried to post so many times per week….and it was too hard with this deadline looming over my head. I was supposed to have a format, posts planned ahead of time…which I find impossible to do. I tend to write off the cuff, often the day something funny or blog-worthy happens, I will sit down at night when the kids are finally in bed, and just plug away ’til it’s done. I probably won’t get “famous” this way, and perhaps this is why Dove is not contacting me-YET-to commit to an intensive blog review of each and every flavor of chocolate they offer…… so I guess I’ll buy my own damn chocolate for now. Unless  you want to send me some. And I will totally review it for you.

jp.jokeroo.com

And now, for my nominations:

1. Neat Habitat
2. All in a Dads Work
3. Deconstructing Doctor
4. A mum in Spain
5. God, guts, and glory
6. Heather needs a nap
7. Anthonymize.net
8. The shameful sheep