Six to me is where it’s starting to sound like a long time. Six years of this blog! Every year I do a little birthday post with some talk of what will be different on the blog coming up. This feels like a year that will be a huge turning point. Maybe the biggest yet! Below are some goals and we did a q&a too!
CONTINUE TO BROADEN CONTENT (BUT NOT TOO FAR)
It will always be a goal to post interesting and quality content; I continue toward more topics under the homemaking umbrella. Recently I’ve done a few more posts about motherhood (doing art with kids and more to come). So that category will grow and I hope it’s helpful for other like-minded homemakers.
Content is super exciting this year because our house renovation is going to be over the halfway point which means there will I think be lots of finished room and before and afters that I think will be really fun to see as a reader.
One of my goals last year was to write in a more casual voice and I have loved that. For a lot of reasons, I am loving blogging more than ever.
HOLIDAYS AND SEASONAL CONTENT
I’d like to write more in line with the calendar (since that’s how I operate in my home). Seeing other moms who have special food or a craft planned for valentines day, the olympics starting, a change of seasons, etc. makes me so inspired.
My hope is to have a tab that divides things like recipes, children’s activities, or hospitality ideas by the season or holiday. I love living life that way and finding ways to celebrate all the time through the year.
REDESIGN MOBILE
Are you reading this on mobile? Soon it will look really pretty! I plan to re-vamp the whole site too.
STREAMLINE PHOTOGRAPHY
I used to feel pressure to use all different props or backgrounds for my food styling. Then I realized many food photographers I like do a very formulaic thing, and it is actually sometimes more pleasant as the viewer. It’s both easier and prettier. And I’m a girl who is pretty faithful to my love for white, so I’ve loved photography with just marble and white accessories to showcase the food. It looks good that way in my instagram feed and the recipe index.
On instagram stories people submitted questions for this post, so I thought I’d do a little q&a of some of the most popular questions to finish off the blog’s birthday.
How do you choose paint colors for your house?
I paint so many rooms white which maybe at first seems like I don’t love color, but I really do. I have certain colors on my “love” list (most shades of blue, most shades of yellow, bright red orange, dark wine, olive, emerald, blush pink) and certain colors on my blacklist (most oranges, lime green, burgundy). I paint my walls white so that I am free to use a lot of color and pattern in everything else in the room. Also for most of us who have a middle of the road house size, your home will feel so much bigger and more continuous and calming when you do one color for as many of the rooms as possible. That’s what I’m doing, at least for our first floor. And then when we move upstairs for renovations I will do color in the bedrooms which are more secluded and don’t need to flow as much.
For picking color, it always looks more intense on the swatch than in the room. If I want a subtle color, I actually get out a paint deck and go to the “neutrals” section and pick a color that is a neutral with a lot of the color you want. For example, I want my daughter’s room to be blush pink, so I will not go to the pinks section, but go to the whites, and I think pick the most pink white. If you ARE going for a saturated bold color you don’t have to do this. And that’s usually how I work with color, either very subtle or extremely intense (like I love an acid yellow). The stuff in the middle usually doesn’t do much for me.
Any and all questions about my parenting.
I love writing about parenting and motherhood in general. The exception to that is that I am kind of wary of talking about sleeping and discipline stuff because that can be very emotional and for some things, different families have found completely opposite methods work for their priorities.
My best advice is to build a relationship with an older mom who you want to parent like and learn from her. I have one, maybe two mom friends who I asked about sleeping stuff and no one else. Any questions? I just went to them and got consistent advice for one philosophy. Googling or crowd sourcing opinions on the internet (even from a bunch of people you know) I think is pretty useless. I credit how peaceful our home is and how easily motherhood has come partly to lots of things I learned from the mom veterans I have a real life, face to face relationship with. (But definitely the kids’ personalities and the mom’s personality is part of this too, so I don’t discredit those factors for people!) I think the internet is really good for things like craft ideas, food ideas, decor inspiration, organizational stuff, cleaning tips, entertaining tips, etc.
How do you keep your house so clean?
This is kind of hard to answer because families have their own norms for level of cleanliness they like to live in. My husband likes being neat. And I’m into cleaning (versus organizing.) Like sanitizing things. So we don’t like to go to bed if the house is messy, but it’s not usually stressful, just something we do at the end of the day to feel nice. I’m working on a post with few tips for keeping things clean with kids.
What’s your advice to bloggers who want to grow? Do you think blogging is a viable option for income?
Blogging is a viable option for income, but it is not an easy option for income. Sometimes I hear people say they’re looking to make some extra money so they’ll start up a blog will soon add an extra income on the side with a couple hours everyday. Which is not how it works generally!
Almost everything for earning money blogging hinges on the number of readers you have. I think photography is everything for most niches and for some niches writing is key too. Six months would be abnormally fast to start making a couple hundred dollars a month. But you could do it – if your content is excellent. Here too I wrote some advice on creative endeavors.
How has your relationship with your husband changed after kids? How do you keep it strong?
I don’t feel like our relationship changed a lot from having kids! Now we have a new shared love that we spend a lot of time talking about! One way to keep a strong marriage is thinking of you and your husband as one entity (because you are!). Anything you do “for” the other person is not not for you. That frees you from keeping score of what he’s done for you compared to what you’ve done for him. When two people are both sacrificing for each other both people end up getting everything they need. And (the obvious what if question!) if he’s not doing that, the most compelling way to win him over is you doing it freely. And even if he isn’t won over, you doing the right thing matters.
How has your love of cooking changed from becoming a mom? How do you fight through times of less inspiration to put great food on the table?
People ask me a lot some variation of “you love cooking, how can I love cooking too?” And the first thing I want to say is in the past I naturally didn’t like cooking that much. It is a grind. But it helps to acknowledge that you are going to be cooking for fifty years, so you should get good at it and learn to like it. Which, I can attest I have more and more.
At the place where I exercise, one of the phrases they use during the work out is “don’t stay on top of the work.” Which means don’t just get through this hour, but push and engage your muscles as much as you can, and make it hard so you feel it and actually produce something good. Which don’t stay on top of the work is actually a really good thought I have applied to things like dealing with suffering this side of heaven and with my everyday work in the home. Don’t try to get by doing as little as possible. You have to provide meals one way or another, so get down into it and do something good instead of going through the motions and doing something mediocre. AND STILL we must balance this with sometimes what is best for your family is simple or frozen meals! Work hard, and rest. And do whatever will most serve the home in this season.
(I just wrote that same idea in the doing art with kids post. It applies to so much of homemaking!)
You can read all of my posts about blogging here.
