the mommy blogger label.

me: I don’t really think of myself as a mommy blogger.

Scott: What are you talking about? You have a drawing of you and the kids in your blog header. Of course you’re a mommy blogger.

me: But I think I’m more than just a mommy blogger. I mean, I right about depression, and autism and quilting too…

Scott: What’s so bad about being labeled a mommy blogger anyway? It’s the "in" thing right now.

me: Harrumph.

I’m not sure why I take issue with the label “mommy blogger”. Perhaps it is because I feel like there is something dismissive about it. It’s a term that casts a wide net that supposedly captures all women bloggers who happen to have children. I feel like the term implies that all I do is talk about having children and about being a “mommy”. Maybe this really goes deeper though. The root of this is that as a society, we undervalue the role of the mother. Calling an adult woman a “mommy”, adult to adult, is completely condescending. I can’t imagine being in a meeting at work and having someone say “well Katrina, since you’re a mommy, why don’t you weigh in on this issue”. Say what? Not cool. Also, men who blog, and also happen to have kids, aren’t called “daddy bloggers”. They are just bloggers. Nobody would call Drew Magary a “daddy blogger”, but he writes about his kids all the time.

I consider myself a:

• mental health blogger
• autism blogger
• quilt blogger
• social media blogger
• travel blogger
• reality tv blogger
• live blogger
• humour blogger
• weight loss blogger
• consumer blogger
• feminist blogger
• procreating blogger

How do all of those things roll up into the catch-all term “mommy blogger”?

nip and tuck.

I'm a little late to the party on this one (like 2 months), (but I'm not known as one who arrives on time so at the very least I'm consistent). The folks at blogger.com have been busy bees lately, making all sorts of updates available for bloggers like me who couldn't be bothered to move over to wordpress or typepad for additional functionality. The good news, is that now I don't really have to. The only feature I wanted that blogger didn't offer in its off-the-shelf templates was the ability to have static pages and a horizontal nav across the top of your blog. That bugged me because to have an "About Me" type page I had to create a post, which wasn't really want I wanted, so I never did. The other option would have been to start monkeying around with html, which isn't really where I want to spend my time.  I have always stood by the motto "if you write it, they will come".  It doesn't matter how pretty your site is.  In fact, nobody cares about that if the content is top notch.

Anyway, along with the static pages, they added a whole bunch of other hoo-ha. Like colour pickers and new ways to share your stuff through different social media channels. Embedding videos is easier as is uploading and editing images. The one thing they haven't done that bugs me is make it so you can add gadgets on the new static pages. I would love to make a blog roll page, but I'm not about to recreate all my link lists so for now they will stay put in the right margin. 

If you are interested, the header is now updated (thanks Chris!) so the kids look their age (and in Scott's opinion "French").  I have also added some ego booster pages about me, who everyone I talk about is, Max's journey from diagnosis to present, quotes I dig, and my bucket list (and if you have any really cool things you think I should add to that, let me know!).  So, have a look around, enjoy, try the veal, I'll be here all week.