In the beginning…

One of the Blog Dare prompts asks ‘What first prompted you to blog? Why did you create your blog?’. I thought this one would be fun to answer and a good addition to GTKM (getting to know me).

Well, it all started in late 2007. Sometime in the Fall. My son was born in June that year, our first born, and naturally everyone wanted updates on how he was doing, new developments, and all the other fun new baby stats. At the time, my husband was stationed in Blount Island, in Florida, which meant 90% of our family couldn’t just stop by and see the new addition to our family. With family in 5 different states, I thought the best way to keep everyone up to speed on all this ‘us’ was through a blog.

I used it as a type of family journal. But, not everyone caught on. They’d either forget to look/read, or forget the web address. Or I’d get complaints that the page took too long to load. Overall it didn’t seem to be a very effective way to keep the whole family up on all our latest adventures and I got discouraged and quit blogging. At least for that sole purpose. Here and there I would write a post to share, but didn’t have an audience and no clear path or direction for my blog and I remained discouraged and non-bloggy.

I didn’t really get motivated to start up again until the summer of ‘09. There was a site, sampa.com, that offered free family pages for showing pictures and journal/blog posts. That got me back in the habit of writing. Unfortunately, Sampa shut down and that was the end of that. But I was in the habit of writing and love it, and I didn’t want to let it go. Well, it didn’t take long at all to figure out where I wanted to take my blog.

While on recruiting duty my husband met with a LOT of parents and spouses. And a good share of them wanted to meet me as well. They wanted to know what the life was like from my perspective. Usually at some point during the conversation I was told how amazing I am. And not just from these people that we’d meet with. I had been told that before from others. Even random people. Amazing for being a military wife, thanking me for doing what I do, and so on. But I never did, and have to say still don’t, see myself that way. To me this life is normal. My husband is amazing, along with my super amazing kiddos, but I’m bias anyway. As for me, though, no I don’t see myself that way. Being a military wife is the path in my life that I chose, and the various challenges that it may bring are, in my opinion, no different than anyone else’s everyday challenges. The type that they are is the only difference. However, it’s not the challenge that defines us, but the way in which we deal with them that shows are true character.

That’s when the light bulb turned on. I would blog about my military wife life. Open a window for people to peer into and see that although we do have our own types of challenges in life, we’re still pretty normal people who live pretty normal lives and show my readers what that consists of. Normal to me is actually pretty different to many others, but as I have said many times I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Thus the debut of Semper Fi Momma. I call my blog this because I AM always faithful. Not only to my husband and the Corps, but also to my children and to myself. My love and constant attention is always directed towards my family, but I know that it’s also important to direct some attention towards myself from time to time. This is why I blog. Writing is a passion of mine. It really always has been, but just in the last few years, as I’ve noted, has this spark really started to flame. My husband is my world, and my children are my universe. Their needs are my needs. This along with so many other reason is why I feel the name Semper Fi Momma truly fits me and this blog.

I love the door that blogging has opened for me. 2010 has been a more productive blogging year for me, and a real eye opener as to what the blogging world has to offer. It’s opened a window into social media that I would have never before even dared to peek through. Now I find I love it and all of the great connections that I’ve made. A few month back I tripped over the chance to do some product reviews and immediately got sucked in. A little too much. I found that I became a little obsessed with trying to find products that I wanted to review and companies that would want me to review them. After taking a ‘time-out’, during our move, and really thinking on what the focus of this blog would be and the direction I would like to take it I decided that I did not want my main focus to be on products and reviewing them. That would take me in a different direction than what I was originally trying to head towards. I still like them, and will still do them, but I won’t be working as hard as I was on searching them out. Surprisingly I find I get more gratification out of being ask to write a guest post or be a contributing writer for another website.
Sharing my world as a military wife/family and our adventures is and always will be the brunt of my focus on this blog, mixed in with a few things I enjoy doing such as baking and cooking, watching movies, and reading.

Where would I like this to take me? Well, nowhere and everywhere. LOL This blog, Semper Fi Momma, will always be my personal blog and that will not change. Ever. With that being said I do hope, one day, to be picked up by a publication and write for them. Either as a blogger for their site, or in written page form. Either way, it’s a dream and goal of mine I would like to accomplish, and hope that by having this blog and exposing myself to the world of writers and publishers I can someday achieve my dreams. I have no doubt there will need to be more work put into it than just being a blogger, but I take this as a good starting point.

And there you have it, from the very beginning to now. I know some of that info is a repeat for those of you who have been following me from the beginning, and I thank you for listening/reading it again, and thank those who are just recently tuning in. Now that the full story is out there I probably won’t, lol or hopefully won’t, repeat myself again.