Laura wrote today about how she started reading blogs and then blogging herself and I thought I’d do the same.
When I was on maternity leave with Meg, I started to get rather bored spending hours upon hours breastfeeding. I watched a ton of TV (this was when I discovered House!) and read at least 1 book, often 2, a day. When you spend most of your waking hours on the couch with a little baby and that baby is generous enough to give you EXTRA waking hours by refusing to let you sleep, you need a lot of passive entertainment. I started poking around Parenting.com and discovered the (recently defunct) Parenting Post. I liked some of the writers and not so much others. I think there were only 4 at the time and my favorite was Maggie. I read all her Parenting Post stuff, then started reading her archives. When I finished them I was SO sad.
I think I read Lizzie next. Then Arwen. And Maureen (including the Grad Lab stuff!). And Emily. I remember one day I sat at work trying my best not to bawl my eyes out at work while reading about Lucy’s birth (which had happened a couple years earlier).
In early 2010 Maggie and friends started planning The Blathering - Chicago. I’d been reading blogs for 6 months and really wanted to go meet all these people. I emailed Maggie to ask if a non-blogger could go and she said Of Course! Then I decided what the heck, I’ll just TRY this blogging thing anyway. No pressure. I started blogging in February 2010* and kept it a secret for the first two months. Then I started leaving comments linking to it and in May (June?) signed up for The Blathering. I read the entire archives of every attendee (this is when there were only 20 or so) and got to know several of them through comments and emails. I signed up to stay in the official Blathering Condo. It was wonderful. I couldn’t believe I was hanging out with these people who had huge blogs. Me with my little 9-month-old blog I’m certain no one but Blathering attendees had ever seen. I was incredible how nice everyone was and how fun it was to hang out with strangers.
For the longest time, I refused to add blogs to my reader until I’d read their entire archives. I didn’t stop doing that until last summer when it became clear that, second maternity leave nonwithstanding, I wasn’t going to make it through all the blogs of Blathering 2011 attendees by October. I did read a lot of them – even some of the big ones, like Temerity Jane (which took a couple months!). Reading archives is still one of my favorite things. I have to say, though, the thought of someone reading MY archives makes me want to cringe!
Who was the first blogger you read? How did you find them?
*I just now realized I totally missed my two-year blogging anniversary. Ha!
I love this post! I started out reading adoption blogs of IRL acquaintances. I was (am) super interested in international adoption, and I expanded my reader to include lots of adoption blogs. Then I found Lawyerish through adoption blogs, which led me to Jennie and Jonna and so on and so forth. When I got on Twitter I followed these lovely ladies and then followed their friends, then they became my friends, too! So fun. I love love love blogging and blogs and blog people.
ReplyDeleteI started reading blogs when we were first thinking about having a baby and was just a lurker forever. I started my own blog when I was pregnant with Kalena (about a year after I started reading) but I mostly still lurked unless I was reading the blog of IRL friends. Arwen and Emily were some of the first ones I read (and I read through all their archives.) I used to read when I had nothing going on at work. And now that you mention it, I missed my blogging anniversary too! 4 years last week.
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