Hi, everyone!

I'm excited to be joining Katie on this blog with a post from time to time. I'm also a mom to two kids, a boy and a girl. I currently "stay home" with them, although it often feels like we spend too much time anywhere but home. In addition to momming, I volunteer with a group of military wives, instruct group fitness classes to fellow mamas with their littles in tow, teach Sunday school, sometimes run marathons, and, in my free time, read, play with our beagle, try to convince myself I'm crafty, bake (or at least drool over recipes), and write out my thoughts on life. I look forward to venturing further into the world of social media through this forum, and hope it might be possible to help myself and others become better in whatever ways are important to us through the potential for connectedness in modern parenthood.

I must confess, though, that I am admittedly somewhat of a novice and even more of a skeptic where the "biggies" of social media are concerned. I guess I'm a little bit old school. I just got my first smartphone in a well-timed Black Friday sale. Some might definitely would say I'm an organization freak, but I still prefer paper calendars, day planners, notepads and books. And I'm wary of putting personal information out there in internet-land when I don't fully comprehend how it might be used or who might have access to it.

I've even tried to quit. I pulled the proverbial plug. Shortly before my daughter was born, I went through an introspective nesting phase in which I felt an intense need for privacy and quiet in my life. I wanted to be very selective about how and with whom my husband and I shared the most special events of our personal lives, rather than broadcasting our news for all to see. I craved real human interaction, but anything less than that just felt cheap. And so when Facebook changed its format again (back when everyone was "getting timelined"), it served as the catalyst for me, in a self-righteous huff, to deactivate my account. (As if Facebook cared.)

And thus began the dark months. 

I anxiously waited out the last few weeks of my pregnancy, plus an extra-special eight days overdue. Shortly thereafter, it quickly became apparent that I had a(nother) difficult newborn, coupled with a sweet but demanding toddler. My babies take longer than some to sleep or eat very well, which is draining on me, to put it mildly. For several weeks I stayed in a rough place emotionally, and felt sequestered in an unfamiliar place physically - we'd moved 3000 miles from our families and closest friends when I was seven months pregnant. And now I was in inadvertently self-imposed social exile because I was the holdout with no Facebook account.

It took a few months to realize just how much I was missing by trying to maintain a shaky grasp on solitude that just doesn't exist in our world the way it once did. I wasn't making an anti-social media statement so much as just being antisocial, and once the hormones subsided, I was able to see clearly that it wasn't how I wanted to live my life. 

When I came to not only understand but value the role that Facebook and other social media platforms play in our lives, I realized that it was completely within my control to use it to my own benefit, that I could make this a life-enriching tool rather than being the tool.

I reactivated my account quietly - no "I'm back, baby!" status updates or rapid-fire wall posts, but with a wholesale pruning of my friend list. I started to follow pages for all the things I'd been missing out on. I found out where to look for playgroups near me, when my postnatal fitness class was rained out, which of the other families in my husband's unit were slated to move to the same post we were heading to next - none of which I would have known otherwise. And slowly, as I became more comfortable with the mom-of-two juggling act, my real life followed suit and we became more engaged in a world from which we'd detached for brief period of time. Though it sounds like it, it's not an exaggeration to say that allowing myself to rejoin the social media world had a dramatic impact on my overall well-being. I felt more connected, more in tune with my own interests and goals. I was inspired, I was involved, I was generally making progress in my life.

…And then I joined Pinterest.