With all the birthdays that have been going on at our house, it's easy to focus just on the human ones and forget one other very important one: a birthday that I always, always, forget.

But not this year!

Next week marks SEVEN YEARS that I've been blogging.



That's kind of ancient in the blog world.

I actually got started with it because I was writing a newspaper article at the time about the "new, emerging trend" of blogging. In fact, I was fortunate enough to land an interview with one of the guys who founded the Blogger.com company. And to demonstrate just how easy it was for anyone to start a blog, I went through the steps of setting up my own, and described them for the article.

And then didn't know what to do with the site. And then decided I liked it and would keep it up on my own.

To celebrate my blog's birthday, this week I'm going to revisit some old posts--one or two from each year I've been blogging. Today, I'm taking it all the way back to 2004. The blog was kind of sketchy back in those days. The first two months focused mainly on journalism, writing, and blogging. Then I had a baby and my posting dropped considerably (imagine that). For a few months I barely wrote at all. For whatever reason, I didn't want to be considered a mommy-blogger. I wanted to find *important* things to write about. But I couldn't. Once I embraced that starting in 2005, I really began to find my blogging voice, if you can call it that.

But for today, let's go back and read about how I felt like I didn't have time to do everything I wanted to do, and how what I really wanted to be was a novelist.  (Hmmm, not much has changed in seven years).

originally published Monday, Dec. 27, 2004:

 funny, female, new mom author

 first off, let me just say that i dont know how other bloggers do it. i never update this thing. it's like the diariesi kept during adolescence. i'd get all into the diary thing and write every day, then nothing for months. i always felt that i had nothing to say. all i ever wrote abo9ut then was boys. now i just have the one guy n my life, eric, and there really aren't any dramatic soap opera like twist and turns in our relationship. We're married and we have a baby and life is pretty great actually, but not that interesting, really. So I never know what to say when I write.

That's assuming I find time to write. Now here I am thinking of a specific person, an author named jennifer weiner. She wrote some great books, including one I got for Christmas and just finished reading, "LIttle Earthquakes." It's about being a new mom, and I just really related to it. I felt like I related to the character in her other novel, "Good in Bed," also, because she was a newspaper reporter.

According to her web site, Jennifer is a former newspaper reporter who became a novelist, who writes funny books about women in real- life situations. Jennifer also happens to be a new mom and finds time to update her blog all the time about the cute and funny things that happen to her and Lucy. How does she do it? I want to be her. 

 NOTE: I swear that by the time my second daughter was born, I had completely forgotten that Jennifer Weiner had a daughter named Lucy. I did not name my sweet Lu in homage of her.


This was followed shortly thereafter by this one, also published Monday, Dec. 27, 2004:

baby asleep now


So that last post maybe didn't make much sense and the typing was horrible. But that's because Beth was sitting and squawking in my lap at the time. She is now asleep and I can actually attempt to be grammatically correct.

I wrote that I want to be Jennifer Weiner, but I don't really want to be HER, per se. Here are the things I want to be/do: Funny. A novelist. At least someone who writes in her blog more often than once every couple of months, because I figure if I'm going to have a blog, it's just stupid to not actually write in it.

I'm not sure I can do much about the funny. I think funny is something either you have, or you don't have, and I don't have it. I appreciate humor. I appreciate funny people. My husband is very funny. But I do not have the gift of being funny.

And writing in the blog is something that is easy to change. Or at least it's something I can SAY is easy to change. I just need to do it. Same with writing a novel. The problem with writing a novel, is you have to have an idea, and I don't. Maybe if I just started writing something I would come up with one. We'll see.