Blogging for Connection

I've heard some more popular bloggers lament recently that they missed the olden days.  The days when blogging was more about writing and making connections and leaving comments.  They say that now that they have partnerships, sponsorships, and that they have branded themselves they have to blog for those purposes more often than the original reasons they started blogging.  This made me so sad that they saw those as the old days - for so many of us that have been blogging for a long time (it will be five years for me in February) those wonderful days of connecting with people across the blogosphere are still very much in the present.

Although I'd like to take my blog to the next level, reach a wider audience, and provide information via product reviews, I never, ever want to lose the time or opportunity to simply stumble across another blog or even worse, lose the time for commenting.  Even if I don't post a blog for weeks, I never stop reading and commenting.

I was cleaning out some e-mail today and found a comment that someone left on my blog last year during NaBloPoMo.  I followed her link and look at what I stumbled across:

I'll quote here and link to her blog.  http://torpidtrifling.blogspot.com/

I Want to Tell the Truth When I Grow Up

Studying early childhood education as an undergrad, I attended a conference where the following question was posed.

What do you say to parents or administrators who ask what you're doing to "prepare young children for school"?

 When I heard the answer the speaker gave, I gasped, and knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I like to say: If you knew that, in a year or so from now, there would be a famine across the entire earth, and there wouldn't be enough to eat ...

... would you start starving yourself now?

I want to be someone who can say things like this out loud, in a professional setting. Getting paid for it will just be the icing on the cake. 

I love that story - it so adequately sums up what I think about early childhood education and how I want my children to be taught.  More than that, I love that someone else out there in the world thinks the same way I do about things !

Blogging (and my friend Elaine) has gotten me some free movie tickets, some free stationary, and some free cupcakes.  I am grateful for those opportunities and I hope to get the chance to review more products in the future.  But mostly I blog because I like making a connection.  I like knowing that there are others out there thinking deeply and writing about it.  With my IRL friends who blog, reading their blogs keeps me in touch with their kids and their lives even when we don't see each other as often.

I've got some cool posts coming up in the next few weeks, the least of which will be a little 5th Anniversary celebration !

See you around the internets