Moving shop

Not closing up shop, just moving and changing a little.

I don't know if anyone noticed (let's face it, I only have a few readers, and even then, I haven't been posting often!) but I made my blog private for a few days. It's not private anymore (which you know if you're reading this) but I'm not going to be posting on here anymore.

BUT! I will still be posting.

Let me explain. See, I have a "family blog" that I began shortly before I got pregnant with my son, Elijah. I meant it as a way to keep in touch with family and friends who had moved away, but I didn't post often. Then I got pregnant with Elijah, and all of a sudden started posting more!

I think when I was pregnant with him I experienced depression of some sort, perhaps in the form of prenatal mood disorder (complete self-diagnosis, of course.) All I wanted and seemed capable of doing was baby-related stuff. I tried not to drive my husband crazy talking baby 24/7, and I found blogging about my pregnancy to be a fun way to keep family in the loop, and also express my thoughts and concerns about pregnancy. I LOVED blogging.

(also, somewhere throughout my pregnancy I discovered infertility blogs and realized that, while pregnant after infertility, I still have a lot of feelings about the topic. No surprise.)

Then I had Elijah and my motivation to blog decreased greatly. I love him, I really do, but I felt bored blogging about itty bitty things. Babies don't DO a whole lot, and while I recognized that I was personally enthralled by him and every little milestone, I didn't need to blog about it. So, back in September I stopped.

Along came December, and I decided to start this blog as a place to air my dirty laundry and express my views of the world in a place where my mom wouldn't read it.

I've found, though, that the anonymity has kept me from focusing on the positive and from being optimistic. I AM optimistic, but I don't need a place where I can vent about things, because when I do the problems inevitably seem bigger, you know? I figured it's what I do in my journal anyway, but it's different. I know I still have readers and I know SOMEone is reading what I'm writing. How do I want to represent myself, my family, my beliefs, my corner of the world?

It's something I constantly struggle with; curbing the "real me" and giving people what they want/expect VS. being the "real me" and not trying enough to be the better me I want to become.

I've realized that, often it's a good thing that people have expectations of you, that you try to act positive and upbeat for someone else. It's okay for me to have a blog where I try to focus on the puppies and rainbows rather than the storm clouds and monsters. I can still give attention to the storm-clouds, but the way I do so in front of other people affects my own perception of the world around me.

So, philosophical and long story short, I've decided to pick up my family blog again.

However, I fully realize that blogging has a greater appeal now that I'm pregnant again, and will probably diminish in appeal once this baby is born. One of my motivations in switching blogs is that, I really appreciated looking back on my last pregnancy and reading everything I wrote about it. I want that record for this time too. I want a place where I can record my thoughts and experiences, so I'm not going to lie. My "family blog" has totally become a pregnancy blog. I don't know how it'll transform after this baby, but I'm going to take it one day at a time.

In the meantime, I wanted to give that blog link, in case there were people who were interested in continuing hearing from me. I still plan on reading blogs, so I'll be around, but it'll be as my alter-ego. I think my name under that gmail account is Holly E. G. or maybe just Holly G. My new blog is a wordpress one, however, so it won't be listed under my gmail profile. Here's my new blog:

www.hollygandco.wordpress.com

It was a big pain to switch to wordpress, but I did anyway because I want to be able to password-protect some posts. There are a ton of posts on there from my original family-blog (if anyone's interested) and I transferred all of the posts from this blog over to that one, but password-protected some of them because there is stuff my family in general is not privy to, such as my depression struggles, seeing a counselor, and even the fact that we did IVF once. If anyone has interest in reading those posts, please let me know and I'll find a way of getting it to you, but from this point on, the password-protected posts are equivalent to private journal entries, as I've decided to combine my blog and journal (the real reason I switched to wordpress. I'm NOT okay with my mom reading my journal!)

Anyway, I think that's about it! I hope I haven't offended anyone by making this change. Please know that it had nothing to do with any comments, and everything to do with my own tendency to dwell on my struggles rather than my triumphs. Infertility has been a big part of my life, but I need to let it mold me into something better than the person I was becoming by focusing so much on my negative feelings and experiences. I firmly believe that trials are the refiner's fire, and that they are meant to beautify and strengthen us. I need to not melt away as dross in the process, and this attempt to focus on the positive and good things in my life is my effort to move past (or through) this trial.

P.S. I deleted previous posts on this blog. My reasoning was that, now that they were on my new blog, they were no longer necessary. Also, I didn't want the password-protected posts on that blog to be found on this blog, and there are parts on non-password-protected posts that I still edited. So I felt it was safer for my privacy on those posts to delete them all entirely, given that I'm going from an anonymous blog to a non-anonymous one. :)