So pretty much every year since I’ve been blogging, I’ve done NaBloPoMo.

Except this year.

You wanna hear my excuse?  It’s really good, I swear.

Ready?

Okay.  Here it is:

I forgot.

Seriously.

I totally forgot.  And because I’m an absentee internet-er on the weekend, I didn’t see other people’s NaBloPoMo posts until, oh, yesterday.  Afternoon.

*cough*

I’m kinda disappointed in myself here.  I mean, this is the confirmation that I have been sucking at this blogging this lately.  I forgot NaBloPoMo, for crying out loud.  I rocked that dang thing every single year (not that I won anything, oh ho no).  I could have rocked it this year too.  Or, you know, at least used it to get myself out of this stupid slump I’m in.

So yeah.  No NaBloPoMo here this year.  I have the shame.

Maybe I’ll try to post every day anyhow.  But since I’m not “official”, I can’t see that sticking too well.  Damnit!

Oh well, there’s always next year, right?

I’ve been a big time, grade A, first class blog flake lately.

Not exactly news for anyone who has been keeping track of my update schedule over here, to be sure.  But I’ve also been a flake in keeping up at my friends’ blogs.  Now THAT is pretty sad.  This knitting obsession of mine has taken over.  Any spare time is spent knitting.  And while I will often compose pithy and humorous blog posts in my mind while I’m knitting my bazillionth pair of baby pants, composing something in your mind isn’t quite the same as putting the knitting needles aside and typing it up on the laptop.  And Google Reader is literally starting to get cobwebs around the corners.  I used to do the bulk of my blog reading while I was nursing Evie, via my iPhone.  But lately I’ve been sucked into some stupid iPhone games and that is generally what I’m doing when I would normally be reading blogs.

What is my excuse?  I don’t have one.

And I feel bad, because I feel like I’ve missed out on some things with some of the bloggers I consider myself closest to.  What does it say that I just found out like two days ago that Brit’s blog was busted?  Something I could have helped her with, I’m sure, but I was a flake.  So I didn’t.

That’s not cool.

Shoot, I spend more time on Facebook, reading up on people’s statuses than I do reading their blogs.

This has to change.  I don’t want to be “that blogger”.  The one who is completely out of the loop and detached from the community.  I know notgoing to BlogHer this year has affected me this way.  Why bother to connect to the community when I’m not going to BlogHer?  What’s the point?  Of COURSE there is a point.  But when you’re a) lazy and b) occupied elsewhere, well… excuses come easy.

There’s no reason why I can’t keep up my blog and read my favorite blogs though I’m not going to BlogHer.  And there’s no reason I can’t do this while I continue knitting.  I just need to get my act together.

I hate being a slave to stats, but the stats don’t lie.  And they show a significant drop in the last six months.  Again… NOT COOL.  I’m letting people down.  I’ve become BORING.  GAH!

So I gotta knock that off.  Anyone have any helpful suggestions?  Wanna come over here and kick me in the pants?  Anyone? (Is anyone still here?)

I’m sure you’ve all noticed that over the last several months, my blog has taken somewhat of a backseat in my life.  This has been about a year in the making, it seems.  Ever since Evie was born, I started cloth diapering and then knitting, well… my mind has been focused elsewhere.

I want to make something clear:  I am not quitting the blog.  I’ll probably always have a blog, at least for as long as it is feasible in my life.  Having this sort of outlet is essential to me, I think.

But at the same time, I’ve definitely taken a step back from the marketing of my blog.  I’ve decided that it’s really not for me.  Making a brand out of this blog or my name or whatever, just doesn’t interest me at this stage in the game.  Besides, I never was very good at it.  I don’t have a head for business matters like that.  And I’m not near aggressive enough to make it successful.

I’ve decided that, for now, I’m just happy with my blog as it is right now and if it makes me $50 a month or $0, that’s fine with me.  Anything above and beyond the pure satisfaction of writing my posts and putting them out there is just icing on the cake.

No pressure.  Pure joy.  That sounds like a nice place to be at, yes?

You know, this isn’t the first time that I’ve gone back to read something I posted from my iPhone and gone, “WTF??”  Because really.   That post makes it all seem very sturm and drang and BLAH BLAH BLAH, boring and STUPID!  I think my eyes rolled reading my own post so I can only imagine how the two of you out there who are reading this reacted.

For that?  I apologize.

Yes, last week was very had.  Yes, I had a lot of crabbyness.  Yes, I let my feelings get hurt over stupid stuff that isn’t supposed to hurt my feelings.  Yes, there are times I want to high-tail it to the border just so I can have a break.  But holy cow, doesn’t everyone?  I hardly think I’m unique in that respect.  So please know that the pity party thrown in my post last night wasn’t QUITE as dramatic and pitiful as it came across.

I may be a loser, but even I have standards.

I honestly think maybe it’s the teeny screen of the iPhone that you have to type out a blog post on that makes all the stuff I post from there come out all weird and un-evenly toned.  Yep.  That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

Thankfully, I don’t think the heat will get the better of me this week (yes, I do think that the heat contributed to 90% of my crabbiness… y’all need to believe me when I say I HATE THE HEAT).  Kile put our window a/c unit in the living room today and I’m currently enjoying some machine-generated coolness and am loving it more than I can express in words.

It’s not ALL bad.  Yes, I am mildly depressed.  I’m pretty much used to it by now and I think most of you are used to it too (you know, all two of you).  But like I said, BIG DEAL.  Who cares?  I don’t care.  You don’t care.  NO ONE cares.  Moving on…

It’s Sunday!  And I had a fabulous breakfast at Mimi’s Cafe this morning that may have made my toes curl.  And Evie almost choked on a honeydew melon!  It was good times, all around. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go decide whether or not I need to have something to eat right now.  This is going to require a lot of thought.

A picture from the drive-in.  Just cuz I can.

A napping girl.  Cuz she’s cute.

A blog is a funny thing.  It’s easy to read someone’s blog and because you are getting daily (or nearly daily) updates on this person’s life, you can therefore easily believe that you know more about this person and their life than you actually do.  It’s an easy mistake to make.  After all, you have no idea what details the blogger is leaving out.  A person’s blog is a VERY subjective thing.  There could be five major things that happen to a person that day and they could only mention one.  Or none and instead choose to talk about the weather.  As a reader, you are following what that blogger wants to share and are kept in the dark about what they don’t.

Such is the case with me as well.  Particularly when it comes to my children.

Don’t get me wrong.  I can understand the average reader wondering WHY I don’t talk about my oldest very often.  Does he even exist anymore?  Is she ignoring him in real life as much as she does on her blog?

And that’s the dangerous path right there.  Does love = blog exposure.  Certainly NOT.  You can hardly judge how much value is placed on a person due to how much a person talks about them on their blog.  I think of several bloggers who rarely mention their husbands because the husband has ASKED not to be mentioned.  And then the readers then wonder if she really is married, does she even care about her husband?  Is there DRAMA here that we can wonder about?

I hope you see how silly this line of thinking is.

I didn’t have my blog when Harry was very young.  But walking through our home, 90% of the pictures on the walls include him in his various stages of life.  Harry was the center of our world for MANY years.  And the harder it was for us to have another child, the more we held him to us.  I used to take him to get professional pictures done every month or so for the first two years of life.  I would take him to storytime at the library, MOPS, the park… He made me a mother and that holds a special place in my heart.  But he IS nine years old and in the third grade.   He needs more privacy now.  I don’t want something I write about him today to be the thing that gets him picked on at school tomorrow.  I make a studious effort to recognize and respect this.

I did have the blog when Liam was young.  If you notice the tag cloud in my sidebar, LIAM is the tag with the largest font.  Which means he has been mentioned more than just about anything else (at least since I’ve been doing tags).   Just look back at my archives for 2006-2007.  During his first year of life, my posts were filled with stories and musings and photos, photos, photos.  I love myself a baby, you know.  And I love photographing babies, while they still lay around and LET you photograph them.  I’d say about 10-20% of the photos on our walls have Liam in them.  I haven’t had as many professional pictures taken of him, but I did take a few of the photos I took of him, print them out and hang them up.

The thing is, Liam is 2 1/2.  He’ll be three in a few months.  This is pretty much THE MOST ANNOYING AGE EVER.  For any kid.  He is a challenge and a struggle.  This does not mean we do not love him.  It means he EXHAUSTS me.  I figured out that I spend the majority of my day dealing with him in one way or another.  Kissing his booboos when he falls (he is the clumsiest child alive), disciplining him when he deliberately disobeys me or thwacks Evie on the head for the 15th time that day, trying to get him to eat, changing him, dealing with naps, letting him sit on my lap when he’s feeling needy… He’s a different child than Harry was.  He requires a lot more energy.  And often, when it comes time to write on my blog, I don’t talk about him because I NEED A BREAK.  The mental break of not discussing him helps a lot.  Again, this does NOT mean that we don’t love him.  Quite the opposite.  He charms and delights us on a daily basis.

And, let’s face it.  Evie is the baby.  Like I said, I love babies and I love to photograph and muse about them until the cows come home.  I’ve often said that thank goodness Evie was a girl because otherwise she might not get any attention at all.  She would have the blog posts, the stories, the musings and the photographs.  Because I love babies.  But as it is she is in TWO photographs on our walls here at home and both of those are either family portraits or taken with her brothers.  She has zero representation by herself.  And I haven’t done a thing with her baby book in MONTHS.  And often I have to leave her to play while I deal with Liam.  And yes, I do generally work more with her than the boys but again with the BABY thing as well as the NURSING thing (she will NOT take any sort of plastic nipple, no matter how hard I’ve tried).  When we go out as a family on the weekend, I generally wrangle Evie while Kile wrangles Liam.  It works easier that way.  Which isn’t to say that if Liam needs me that I completely ignore him.  Just that Kile puts him in his car seat while I put Evie in hers so that we’re not standing out there in the parking lot all day while I do both.  Heh.  Makes more sense that way, don’t you agree?

When anyone suggests, no matter how benignly, that perhaps I have a preference for one child over the others, that hurts me deeply.  I’m sure other mothers who have more than one child can understand what I mean when I say that.  I doubt it is possible to love one child more than the others.  I love all of them and yes, in different ways.  The way I love Liam is entirely different than the way I love Harry or Evie.  This is because of their wildly different personalities.  Sure I feel different, but that doesn’t mean what I feel isn’t love.  And I simply cannot conceive of anyone even HINTING that a preference exists.  It is a cruel thing to say.  CRUEL.  Not just to me but to my children.

I have been wondering what the answer is, if any.  What do I do?  Not talk about ANY of my children, for fear of slighting one or more and thereby inciting the naysayers?  What would that mean to this blog as it is a mommy blog and I generally am here to talk about being a mommy and that sorta requires talking about children?  I’m not sure what to do.  How to evolve this blog while I myself am evolving as a mother.  No more babies, that’s for sure, so who do I talk about?  Do I “schedule” days that I talk about each child?  That sounds perilously close to work.  And if there’s one thing I despise, it’s feeling like blogging is WORK.

Ugh.

So I think the only thing I can do is to just keep on and talk about what strikes me.  Whether it be Liam or Evie or even Harry.  Or none of the above.  It’s all I can do.  But I never want to hear again that maybe I have a preference for any one child above the other.  Ever.