Once upon a time..

..there was a mum of two (raucous, bouncing toddler and 5 month old baby full of alarmingly cheeky smiles) who decided to jump on the bandwagon and start a blog.

Why? I asked myself this very question, when I felt strongly compelled to do this. Why are blogs an increasingly popular past time for such a rich cross-section of people, including Mums like me who, let’s face it, feel like their brains may actually explode at any point in time?

Thinking about this (in the bath, post-bedtime duty) more or less shaped my first blog post. Firstly, I realised that many of us feel the need (or think it’s a good idea if we ever get the time) to diarise or keep a journal. We wish to capture not only life events, but our thoughts and feelings about those events. For myself, how often do I find myself reflecting, even if just for a second or two, on how amazing it is that my little girl has picked up a particular habit of my partner’s, or on how fascinating it is that, having previously been a ‘lie in bed till 11am’ person, my brain now thinks it’s perfectly ok to get no more than a 5-hour stretch of sleep for 6 months? I rarely get the chance to engage with these thoughts and reflect on them, yet always think I should.

Recently, whilst at a toddler group with other Mums (best tasting cup of coffee and piece of cake around, at this toddler group – probably as this group takes place at that very point in the morning when my body screams “caffeine and sugar, please!”), I coined the phrase ‘mental space’. “I just need some mental space”, I said. This proved to be a very popular phrase, with one Mum getting a spa day out of it after saying the very same to her husband. A blog gives us this informal opportunity to get your mental space and make some sense and order out of stuff that’s just been niggling, bugging or even inspiring you.

A blog is more than just a diary or tool for personal reflection, however. Of course its intention is to be public. We might share it with friends, Facebook, Twitter, the world! I want the world to know that my little girl sang the Alphabet Song to the dentist! We baked psychedelic buns the other day – the kitchen looked like it had been flour-bombed by about a hundred mischievous chimpanzees but I didn’t care, it was soooo lovely!

Sharing this stuff is somehow therapeutic – we expect that like-minded people will read and identify, even comment and tell us their own experiences. Of course some will totally disagree with everything you have to say, and some will be somewhere in the middle. It’s as though blogging is this vast, rich spider web of sharing and experience and expression and confession.

So, “what is this blog about?”, I hear you say. “What’s the angle?”. Hmmm. There isn’t one. Just me and my mental space. With the odd psychedelic bun thrown in.