a thank you letter

while we make the transition from Utah to Arizona, i have some wonderful guest bloggers lined up to fill in on the blog. i hope you enjoy their awesome posts and show them all the love & respect they deserve!

  i’m so grateful i got to meet Dani from This WorkmanLife and even more grateful for her sweet guest post. i had very similar feelings when i first had my son and felt like nothing was going right, like everyone else’s babies seemed to be sleeping/eating/rolling/crawling/etc. better than mine.
but after finding this great blogging community and meeting some wonderful woman i finally felt like i wasn’t alone and i wasn’t a bad mother.

in a lot of ways i feel like meeting these other mommy bloggers quite literally saved me from myself.
i was so emotional and such a wreck before i started blogging.
but after reading other people’s stories and writing my own i am able to be in a better place.

i cannot thank those who have reached out to me to help me enough.
i want to add my gratitude to Dani’s and thank everyone for your friendship & love!

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Hey there! My name is Dani and I blog over at This WorkmanLife. I am married to Bubba and we have a little dude who is six months old. Today, I wanted to share with you an experience that changed my life as a new mommy and share a very big thank you to all of you!

I was past the point of exhausted as I cradled a baby, only a few weeks old in my arms. He hiccupped loudly, as he always did and fussed as he fought sleep. I wanted to cry, but I shushed him and rocked him in my computer chair, as it was the only chair in our tiny apartment that allowed me to get up and out without help of my husband. As soon as the baby was asleep I sat back down and stared blankly at the wall. I had a million thoughts and even more regrets.

I felt angry that I wasn’t able to breastfeed my baby because he wouldn’t latch on. I was even more angry that I couldn’t produce nearly enough milk to even fill half a bottle. I had been prescribed medications, drank so much IBC rootbeer (for yeast) that I was ill and nothing worked. As I started to cry, my husband encouraged me to check my “mommy blogs” and read a little. He was hoping that distracting me from the hormones, the stress and the exhaustion would help me feel better.

That is when I came across a mommy blog that I was brand new to following. She was writing to new mommies about how terrifying it is to be a new mom. About how, if the body parts don’t want to work, that isn’t your fault, about how all newborns struggle with sleeping cycles, about how moms lie to one another about how perfect their new babies are and how they’re not as okay as they tell everyone else they are.  I cried, but for the first time ever, it was a happy cry. Here was someone I could relate to.

As time went on I came to discover new mommy blogs during naptimes and they said similar, if not the same thing. As my baby gets older, I get better at being a mom and as we all are learning, I’ve come to learn something that’s changed my experience as a mom.

Since then I’ve been on a personal mission to write things that other moms want to know. Recipes that are easy to do (and I do blog the ones that DON’T work out as well!), things I am learning from our experiences as a family, and my favorite is to write about our adventures. There are things I’ve learned to do or not do thanks to mommy blogging. There are times that other mommies blog about things that make me feel better about being a mom, because I’ve done it too.

If you’re a mommy blogger, I want to thank you. For being there and blogging about something important for me when I needed it, for answering e-mails and being a friend. Mommy blogging is real. It is honest. It is fun, and if you’re a mommy blogger, you need to know, you’ve helped change my life.