In our ongoing feature, "Why Do You Blog?" it's the turn of Emma from Mellow Mummy to share her blogging story.
What is your Blog Name/URL and Social Networking Links? My blog is called Mellow Mummy and you can follow me on Twitter @jumblyMummy as well as on Facebook.
What is your name/alias? Emma Button. Some call me the Mellow Mummy, online I’m known as jumblyMummy.
How did you come up with your blog name? Right from the very first week after my daughter was born, people started commenting on how relaxed and mellow I was in my approach to motherhood. after about 2 months, all of my other mummy friends started calling me the mellow mummy because they couldn’t believe how relaxed I was about all of the mummy issues they were stressing about.
When did you start blogging? November 2009, when my daughter was about 5 months old.
Why did you start blogging? In the weeks following my daughter’s birth I was involved in the annual Mother & Baby awards testing. All of the new mums I had met, and all of the ladies I had met from my antenatal classes seemed incredibly fascinated by my experiences and wanted to know all about the products I had been trying so that they could make decisions about what to buy themselves. Then, as the weeks progressed and I became known as the Mellow Mummy, I wanted to find a way that I could share my thoughts and experiences and try to spread the mellow mood.
I was finally convinced to start a blog by my own Mum. She obviously noticed that, as a Software Engineer, maternity leave was giving me computer pangs. I was missing my days in front of the computer. She recommended I start a blog. So I did! Now my
Mum is a blogger as well as my
Dad. A whole family of bloggers!
Has blogging met your expectations so far? I don’t really know what I expected from blogging. I don’t think I ever really expected it to become a hobby, but it has. I think I probably only thought of blogging as something to entertain me during maternity leave. It has become so much more than that. I never really had a hobby before this.
I guess the other important thing to me is that I’m a software developer. I’ve always wanted my own website, but I could never think of a reason to create one. Blogging gave me a good reason.
What has been your biggest challenge? Trying to find the right balance between work (I work full time, more or less, in an office full of blokes), motherhood and blogging. I reserve blogging for after Lara’s bedtime which can often mean I don’t get online until 10pm or later.
Share with us your highlight and lowlight. My highlight was being nominated as a finalist for the Best Baby Blog award at the 2010 MAD awards. My lowlight? Have I had a lowlight? I try to stay out of blogging politics – its not my thing so when I do find that people around me are involved, that’s a low point. In these cases (which are thankfully few and far between) I tend to stick my fingers in my ears and go ‘la, la, la’ until things blow over.
What do you hope to achieve through your blogging? Two things really. 1) Spread the mellow mood! I’m very relaxed about some of the things that other mums get worked up about... I just want to be able to show mums that the world isn’t out to get them. 2) To share my experiences. Bloggers who review products are in a very privileged position, especially when it comes to mother & baby products. Lots of mums don’t get the chance to try out more than one different brand of product, so to be able to read the experiences of real mums who have tried out different brands and types of product makes a big difference when they decide which one to buy. I have one close friend who bought two buggies, two car seats, two high chairs and two baby monitors because each time she found that she had just bought the biggest named brand around, but later found that they didn’t do all of the things she wanted; these days she always asks me for tips when ever she needs to buy a baby product!
These days most of the products I review on Mellow Mummy have been sent, or borrowed directly from brands but still these days, when I buy something myself that I really want to share with the world, I’ll write a review because I feel very passionately (either positively or negatively) about a product.
What has been your favourite post and why? I only wrote
this post recently. It’s not a creative work of art but to me it captures exactly what Mellow Mummy is all about. A relaxed, happy approach to motherhood and a mellow mood that is rubbing off on my little girl.
~Karin
