[ . . Wonderful Wednesday . . ] Being part of a tribe

I have (again) missed my regular Wednesday post. This time I am going to blame working for the first time in 2011 and the distraction of the Internet. I have recently found a very welcoming community of wonderful ladies and mums.

Image from Jennifer Ramos at Etsy where you can buy this lovely print!

I had heard about blogging mummy's before I became pregnant but never really had a reason to associate with it all. Then I found out I was pregnant. And then I thought, oh maybe that would be good for me. Being a first time mum-to-be I already had lots of burning questions in my mind. But was I really ready to be a public 'mum'?

Then a couple of weeks ago I saw a link to a blog post on Twitter. The post was called 'Mum blogger is not a 4 letter word'. Intrigued I clicked through ending up at the blog of British Mummy Bloggers. The post seemed to summarise all of my reservations and possible misconceptions of the so termed 'mummy bloggers'.

"Sure there are some folks out there who would define mum or parent blogging as nappies-and-school run content. There are also people who define being a stay-at-home mum as a bon-bon eating job. Why let those people tell us what kind of blogs we’re writing? Why should we let “mum” be a reductive description?

Rather it’s a category that’s useful for all kinds of things: finding a tribe, marketing yourself and finding readers, working with brands. It helps to have the mum blog label, but it needn’t be restrictive. Mum blogging is not a box, it is a window which opens out onto a whole universe of topics." (Full post)

That seemed to help me turn a corner. It was exactly what I was looking for.

So, here I am fully immersed in the 'tribe'. I have officially joined British Mummy Bloggers (and been accepted!) and you can see my shiny badge in the right hand column. I already follow a lot of inspiring mums on Twitter but this has introduced me to more. I have also discovered various blogging prompts including Sticky Finger's (aka Tara Cain) The Gallery and Mocha Beanie Mummy's Silent Sunday which I have been enjoying.

Next thing to conquer is how to attend the CyberMummy conference in June so I can actually meet some of these people in person. Oh, and work out how to get Mr to take me seriously :)