Thankfulness- Day 18- What are you Thankful for?

                                       



     Today I am thankful for blogging. I am inspired by today's Blogger of the Month Post on Alabama Women Bloggers about her being thankful for blogging and how it has brought so much joy to her life as it does all of us who blog and for many of the same reasons. We all have so much in common just through that. It has also though brought us to meet so many friends even if just through the internet and that once a year retreat. It made me reflect on the past year and where I have brought my blog and my brand Raised Southern.

      As a child I loved to write and doodle and still have many of my childhood journals. However when I look back at them and see that half of it is repetitive or about the most useless things I think about all that I should have been writing and experiencing to write about. I started blogging here and there about recipes and stuffed we liked, when I had the time in 2009 as Southern Life Mom and Wife through to 2012 when I decided I wanted to make this into something more. I built a site, I had been making my daughters bows for years at this time and thought it would be great to start a blog and build a brand of my bows and Raised Southern  was born.
     I spent the first few months reading up on where to start what to do and then I realized this was going to be harder then I thought. When you have big ideas like I do and have to take baby steps firsts it tends to be a process. "If it were easy, everyone would do it" Once I had an Idea I spent the next few months blogging recipes we found, crafts we did, family outings and activities, and setting up my site RaisedSouthern.com Building a Site is a complicated thing when you have never been in a programming class and have to look a million things up,                 but it has been worth it and rewarding.
      I never really thought about what I do. I started receiving a lot of views and receiving emails from women about different thoughts, or their ideas or opinions on things and I joined a few sites myself. I have had a few featured posts and  I become correspondent with Alabama Women Bloggers for the blogger of the month series, and I am so excited about where this amazing group of ladies is headed with this site! Even through all of this I've never thought about the actual weirdness of it all. Chantal with Scattered Seashells wrote today in her thankful post for Blogger of the month,

     "You’re writing up posts sharing your life with complete strangers. Who are these people who care about your recipes? What you’re wearing? Where you went this weekend? About your family, husband, child? Why do they even care? And yet, we still keep coming back for more!"
    
      This is exactly what we do and it's also true we keep coming back for more. I have a long list of blogs I like to follow and actually could spend a whole day just blog hopping and reading as I'm sure we all could. When you look at it like this, the question really could be asked why do you blog then? just to put your personal life out there? But the answer for me and for many of women & some men that I know is that it is so much more then that and has now become away for us to not only write, express our views, opinions, share fantastic products with all our friends, and sometimes those not so fantastic products, but also to bring in an extra income. 
     

      So today I was just very inspired by Chantal's thankfulness for blogging and wanted to share my thankfulness as well! Blogging has not only been an escape for me and my own special little place but also a way to build my dream and bring in some extra income all while meeting and befriending some pretty amazing women!