reacquainting

Hi.

My name is Nichole and I'm guilty of neglecting my blog.

I've been neglecting my blog for months now, and even before August my blogging attempts were few and far between. To sum everything up, my life got busy. I'm not apologizing to anyone here but myself, and for a while I've examined why I started blogging in the first place.

When I started this blog I was a frightened new mom, living far away from family, with few friends who had children, and a partner who was away at least half the year. I needed people! I needed someone, anyone, to help me answer the questions I had for myself. Because no amount of book-reading or internet searching can provide you with real answers from real people. The internet was (and still is) super-accessible for someone who for 6 months of her life had to have a child attached to her body. Someone who for that period of time also didn't have a partner to share the ups and downs with, except through email and yahoo chat.

So, blogging was my outlet then, and after a while I made some awesome blog friends. Blog friends who still remain in my blogroll somewhere, in my blogroll account (which I haven't even accessed yet since getting my new computer). These blog friends were amazing, are amazing, and took time to read through my bullshit and make comments worth reading, even when the content they were commenting on was less than worthy of reading.

So thank you, blog friends. Thanks, from the bottom of my little heart.

Here's the bottom line of it all that I've come to realize through self-examination and talks with another friend of mine who also blogs/did blog: I have plenty of things to say, and time enough to write them, but at the end of the day I have less time to read what the other awesome female bloggers have to say.

So, as I begin blogging again, as I desire blogging to tell my story (however dull or ridiculous it may sometimes be), I will probably not be reading every blog of the 100+ I love every day, nor will it be a priority of mine to comment on every blog I read. Because sometimes I read a blog and I think it's amazing and I love that the blogger has shared with me and everyone else who reads, but I have no clue what to say...or what I can say. So if I'm reading your blog and not commenting, I'm sorry.

I also think I got distracted by how easy it is to tweet and update facebook statuses. I value my facebook friends, who are mostly real life friends (some of my blog friends are friends too, and that's how I end up reading other blogs if I do at all, because they post links to their latest blog entries) and I am intrigued by writing something 150 characters or less to sum up my current mood or actions. And I honestly, as a writer at heart, feel slightly robbed by my ability to write something more meaningful because of this. I mean, it's enchanting and hypnotizing to simply write a sentence and be done with it.

I feel I'm losing something in not writing. I once heard someone say that poetry is for young people, and I am discovering in my adulthood that I write poetry NEVER. I have books and journals full of poetry from my young days, and yet have written nothing now. I feel partly that I've been out of practice for so long that anything I write will sound like a corny greeting card. And I don't want that.

Writing from the heart and writing as I do here comes easy to me. Writing what I know, what I experience, and hoping it can help someone who reads it is amazing to me. I feel I have a lot to share, and not a whole lot of people to share it with.

In short, there are 100s of reasons why I enjoy blogging, mostly because it's an outlet for me.

What I plan to do here in the future is simple: I plan to share. I plan to share more about myself than before, though that's always been my goal. So much of who I am revolves around Eleana, my beautiful girl, who before now was just an extension of myself. These days she's becoming something more, something herself. She says and does things that I don't understand, that I didn't influence and I'm realizing that she's going to be different, she's going to be unique, and I love that. This gives us more to work with, more to explore together.

We share a lot...in some ways I think becoming Mommy was hard and in some ways I think it was easy. Either way, that's where I am, but I'm constantly striving to be both Mommy and Nichole.

I will probably share less photos of E, simply because the internet is a scary place and my daughter is growing. She is a girl, not a round little baby. I'm aware of this and aware that her privacy is something she needs to retain. I will hopefully be sharing more photos of fun things, events, and hobbies. This is my goal.

This is a longer post than I anticipated.

In short, I'm welcoming myself back to the blogosphere for now, and am not sure how long this will last. I want it to last a while. I don't want to lose my blog, or the memories it holds, and I hope to record many more here in the future.