This month I decided to join the NaBloPoMo challenge on BlogHer. I’ve been active on BlogHer for a while and have even had a few of my posts featured (see which ones here). It’s a great community of other female bloggers who blog about anything and everything.
NaBloPoMo is a monthly group that challenges bloggers to post every day for the entire month. I should have joined the challenge months and months ago since this has been my goal since starting Beyond Mommying (with the exception of my few months in the fall when I decided to take weekends off before beginning my “Weekend Wisdom” series).
I’m really excited to accept the challenge because this month it will be easy for me to slack off with an eight day trip planned plus numerous birthdays, Honeybun home from school and our homeschooling trial-run (which so far is going pretty well!). I hope that the challenge will keep me motivated and introduce me to other motivated bloggers that are also taking the challenge and blogging every day in July!
This month’s theme is “Decades,” based on the fact that ten years ago blogging was just starting out and largely a man’s world. Now the blogosphere is full with different people, ideas, passions and information and growing rapidly.
Ten years ago I’m not even sure I knew what a “blog” was. My early impressions of “blogging” were that it was a place for people to whine or complain about their lives or share their thoughts that no one would usually care about. So, obviously, I was wrong and blogging was so much more and has become a fantastic tool for sharing information, ideas and experiences.
In July 2004, a decade ago, I was a busy college student in Jacksonville, Florida. Hubby and I (before he was hubby) had just moved into our own place off-campus. I was doing summer classes (Spanish 201 and 202) and working at Express. I was preparing for my last year of college when I would embark on my final course work and full-time student teaching on the journey of getting my teaching certificate (which I wish could say has come in really handy, but disappointingly it hasn’t amounted to anything).
It was 4 years before we would welcome our first daughter and even before we adopted our first cat (Monk joined our family as our first baby that September). I had no idea what the next ten years would bring. At that time I didn’t know I wanted to go to grad school or that my goal would take us to Oklahoma (where hubby went to grad school, not me). Or that we would end up back in Florida where I would take care of my Nana through her last days and finally get my Master’s Degree (in early childhood education, not dance as I had hoped). And I never would have imagined in my wildest dreams that we would spend two and a half years in Ireland and undertaking a grand European Adventure (and oddly, today marks exactly two years since we returned to Florida).
Ten years ago, I knew I was going to marry hubby someday (though I didn’t expect to wait another 3+ years!) and I knew I wanted a family with beautiful little babies running around and filling our days with love and laughter.
But one think I definitely never would have guessed 10 years down the line, in 2014, is that I would still feel “futureless”. Here I am, thirty years old, married with three beautiful (and mostly) wonderful children and I still don’t know where I’m going in life. After years of teaching preschool and teaching dance and choreographing for programs all over the country (and world) I still don’t feel accomplished. I still don’t feel like I have a clear path or goal in life. I still don’t know what I will be when I “grow up” but I do know that no matter where I go or what I do, my wonderful hubby and beautiful children will be right there with me and that is truly the greatest thing I’ve accomplished in the past ten years.
