The State of the Blog

** Hi Everyone, this is Sarah. I help Terri manage her blog, post things on twitter and try to keep things on here looking fresh and new. After a summer hiatus, we’re happy to be back!! We added a number of new followers (welcome!) last spring and over the summer, so we want to revisit some of your favorite pieces (and ours too!) to remind everyone what makes this blog uniquely TCC. So please let us know which piece was your favorite – send us a message here, or post on our Facebook page. As always, we love hearing from you!! Thanks for following, Sarah**

The State of the Blog

With the help of the fabulous Sarah – my ace administrator and nagger, I have produced this blog for a couple of years.

It spawned from a couple of my mom friends and a few of my former staff members asking me to put my parenting/coaching style in writing. I’m not really sure if my being an older mom who witnessed friends and family having their kids decades before I did gives me a slightly different perspective on raising a family, or if coaching and my inevitable interaction with so many parents rearing their kids right before my eyes shaped my parenting perspective, or if my teaching and counseling background molded my connection with (mostly) young people.

Whatever it was and is – probably a healthy dose of each – I have enjoyed sharing my experiences raising my real kid, Ben and my hundreds of other ‘kids’ – my teams from Sterling Heights and my staff from CHEER! MICHIGAN. (And, by the way, raising and influencing HUNDREDS of other people’s children was much, much easier than raising my ONE!).

And so we go on…

Blogging is an interesting phenomena – it is unregulated and up until just a few short years ago, uncharted. As I researched other blogs that friends thought might interest me, I found a whole lot of what I did NOT want to become – foul-mouthed, narcissistic and poorly written; overly confident, obvious or self-pedal-stilled. It is shocking to me how many bloggers out there presume to be experts in child rearing after exactly 1.5 years of having their first baby! Or how many new moms revel in trying to shock us with their tales of drinking while the kid naps, impress us by putting down their husbands or have a contest with themselves to see how often they can use the word fuck in a single sentence.

Just not my style or my intention.

In fact, because so much of my blog is about Ben – and because Ben is a real person deserving of real respect, I cannot always write and disclose everything I want to share. Last year, I blogged about Ben’s experience trying out for his school basketball team, how incredibly proud I was when he didn’t make the team but handled himself like a champ and went on to star on his intramural team. Well Ben, being an eighth grader at the time and all that, did not like that blog at all and asked (insisted actually – and not all that nicely, come to think of it) that I remove it. Even though I truly think that particular post was most helpful to other parents and coaches, I knew I had to respect my son’s feelings and remove it.

I will continue to share – in the most honest and humble way possible – stories of motherhood, friendship and interpersonal stuff. A re-launch of sorts. There will be new blogs as often as my new high school Freshman Ben – or life – gives me material and we will be interspersing prior blogs that have gotten the most hits and are the most relevant, as well.

And if YOU have an idea for a post, a question, conundrum or situation, we would love to hear from you!! Message us here or on our Facebook page and we’ll do our best to get to it….

Thanks, as always, for reading,

TCC