I've been doing a lot of thinking about this blog since I returned from last week's BlogCamp. May will be the four year anniversary for Being Mrs C and in that time my life, and this blog, have changed a huge amount.
In May 2008 I had not long since returned from a fantastic month long honeymoon in which I travelled the world and had the perfect opportunity to think about what was important in life. I was still working, but if I'm honest I wasn't really enjoying what I was doing. A year or two before I had discovered online discussion forums full of like minded individuals and also found some fantastic blogs which really inspired me. I loved reading about other people's family lives, the crafts that they were doing, the food they were eating and their efforts to be green.
My main reason for starting this blog was to use it to record the things that I was doing in my life that made me smile and that I thought would also inspire others. I was also starting my own "green journey" too and wanted to record that. Very selfishly I also knew that the added "pressure" of finding new things to write about would also keep me doing things I could write about rather than just watching TV after work every night!
I never imagined that four years down the line we would have moved house to somewhere with enough space to realise some of our garden dreams, have the delightful Little Miss C in our lives and be looking forward to a second Baby C joining us later in the year. This blog has changed too. Obviously LMC is one of the main reasons I smile every day and naturally I write about her here. That in itself means that I seem to have fallen into the "mummy blogging" category. Parenting blogs weren't really around that much when I started blogging and hence I didn't really think about writing one. They themselves have emerged as mainstream and changed too. After the economic downturn many parent bloggers run their blogs as a source of income and often their blog contents are dictated by these commercial drivers. Sitting at BlogCamp I started thinking about what all that means for Being Mrs C.
I have started to commercialise this blog, but I'm certainly not receiving an income that makes a huge contribution to our monthly outgoings. A few extra treats for me and LMC, but not much more. I have however met some fantastic people, had some amazing opportunities and also been sent some lovely products to review. I can be all too easy though to just simply accept anything and everything that is offered. A trap that I very nearly fell into…
A conversation with two other local bloggers (Claire from Being a Mummy and Ren from Fabulicious Food) made me realise that I was forgetting one very important thing with my blog – being myself. This is my place to have a voice and I've started to forget that. I want to go back to blogging because I want to do so and because it's a pleasure, not because I feel I have to or because I owe a PR company a review.
So, I want to go back to blog basics. I want to rediscover the things that really make me smile and share them here. I want to keep capturing our family's lives and our green journey going forwards. I also want to use this blog to champion the people, products and campaigns that I support.
I have met some fantastic local businesses through this blog and I hope to continue working with them and encouraging people to keep things local. I also have a couple of really exciting blogger trips in the diary for next month – one for a campaign I support and the other for a company whose ethical stance I really respect. These are exactly the sort of people I hope to continue to work with and to share with you here.
I've got some lovely recent projects that I'm hoping to share about very soon and I'm also doing a bit of planning as to how to give a bit of additional structure to my space here so that I can balance doing the things I love with writing about them. I've had a few days of mental space clearing as I've realised what I want to do moving forwards – now I just need to make it happen.
Mrs C's blogging journey continues and I hope you'll be joining me.
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