Who is the Mom behind Verified Mom?
Good Morning! Today kicks off the first annual summer blog challenge network! I am super excited because I’ve always wanted to try daily blog posting but never really committed to it until I decided to try it on my own. I sat there and tried to figure out 31 days of writing prompts that would be related to summer, and let me tell you, it was hard! But, I did it! With the kids being home from school, I was finding that I had a harder time staying on track in the summer because of our lack of scheduling. By setting up this blog challenge, it forces me to write about preset topics. I won’t be wasting time trying to think about what to write, I’ll just write! I hope that you’ll join me though because it would be fun to see what your spin is to the writing prompts. You can find all the details about the challenge here. But I must get started because today is DAY ONE! I must share information about me, glorious me! Let’s see. When I think of describing me, I always start with, I’m a mom. I am so much more than a mom, but I’ve been mom for 17 years that it’s the first thing I think of. Since I’ve already started with me being a mom, yes, I am a mom. I have three beautiful children that I love to write and share stories about (even when they aren’t the greatest stories).
We are the modern day Gilmore Girls. See why on the blog!
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My oldest is now 17 and starting her senior year in High School. She is contemplating colleges and what she wants to do, “for the rest of her life”. She is leaning towards photo journalism and right now she has her sights on Columbia College in Chicago. It’s not that bad as it’s only about an hour away, but still, when I think of college, all I see are dollar signs and as a parent that terrifies me! I’ll be needing help soon with finding scholarships, grants, financial aid, etc. Should be a very interesting year for sure!
A photo posted by Verified Mom (@verifiedmom) on
My middle one is going to be 14 soon and will be starting 8th grade. Yes that means, two, count them, two, graduations next spring! Yippee! Anyway, he is heavily into gaming and wants to become a game designer. Big field I guess right now so I hope it stays this strong when he is ready to start college and the job world. If he doesn’t go into game design he wants to do something in engineering. He used to play travel baseball and I thought I would miss it, but oddly enough, I don’t, and neither does he. At the end of last season, he lost interest so we decided it was time to quit. I was scared because it was all we knew for so long that what was I going to do all summer and every weekend? Let me tell you, my husband and I have been catching up on household things that we had let go for so long just because we didn’t have the time to take care of things.
This year so far we have cleaned up all our landscaping, planted new bushes, added mulch, fixed our edging and added landscaping lights. Our landscaping looks amazing and I’m so pleased with all we’ve done there. My husband has been a rock star with all these little projects we keep adding to the weekend lists. A couple weeks ago he took off the shutters, outdoor lights and house numbers and repainted them all. Just that small clean up made a world of difference too. Now he’s working on power-washing and staining our wood fence. It’s nice to get all these things taken care of…finally!! But, I digress…
My youngest is going to be 11 and is starting middle school this year as a 6th grader. I am mostly nervous for her because…well, she’s my baby. This means she will now take a bus {no more car rider lines for me-yay} with her brother. She is scared about having a locker and not being able to open it. The typical new school anxiety. She’s an amazing little girl and I just want her transition to this school to be a good one. With my oldest, we ran into a lot of girl drama and bullying so I am more so nervous for that happening again with my youngest. The only difference is my youngest really doesn’t care what other people think of her so she may handle the “girl drama” a bit differently than most. She is such a tomboy and has a lot of “boy” friends because they are more active and she loves to play every sport. She wants to be a police officer/detective right now so it will be interesting to watch her evolve.
Aside from having three amazing kids, I have also been an entrepreneur for many years. I started a business with bandana’s. I would craft different things out of them and it was a huge hit. My designs were on the hit show (back in the day, lol) Extreme Makeover, Home Edition. It was a very cool business that I’ve actually started to think I should start it up again! But, from there, I decided I liked helping Work At Home Moms get their products to celebrities because after going to a “gift suite” and spending a buttload of money, I wanted to find a way to accomplish the same buzz without spending all that money. And I did it. I helped thousands of small businesses get their products to their favorite new mom celebrity. Their products were featured in celebrity magazines, on celebrity kids, online and off…it was an amazing business and I enjoyed every moment of it. It wasn’t until last year though that I decided I needed to close those doors. Things had started to slow down and I was finding that I really enjoyed blogging and working with bloggers and people in a more administrative setting. I loved working in public relations and it really taught me a lot so I wanted to share that along with my wordpress knowledge so I started my own Virtual Assistant business for bloggers and businesses. Now I incorporate all my expertise and offer a wide variety of services that start with assisting with setting up a website/ecommerce site, to launching it, to promoting it, to maintaining it, to social media management, to consulting. I can be there for my clients from start to finish….and I LOVE it! With my love of writing, I have this blog but I also have a review blog, Tots To Teens Magazine. So you see, I am very skilled and I often don’t give myself the credit I do deserve!
On a personal note, my husband and I just celebrated our 20 year anniversary. I am not going to say the 20 years has been peaches and cream, but we’ve weathered just about every storm and we are still standing…together. We met in 1989 at a friends graduation party and haven’t been apart since. We have our extreme differences and are so opposite that I have no idea how we’ve lasted this long, but we have much to my surprise! At the end of the day, no matter how annoyed I may be, or how annoyed he may be, we are still best friends and there is no one else I’d rather be with! 🙂 I’m just waiting until we win the lottery…then we’ll see if we were meant to be together forever! 😛 He is a drywall finisher by trade and his field here has been rough. Since 2009 he has had on and off work and I’ve had to take on an part-time job outside the home, but we all do what we can to survive this crazy world. I’m assuming it never gets easier, right?
Enough about me though, tell me something about you now! 🙂 Please feel free to leave me a comment! If you’re a blogger and want to join my blog challenge network on Facebook, please do! I’d love to see you there and help support your blog throughout this month long challenge!
Love these kinds of posts because I love getting to know the blogger behind the blog!
Hey! Awesome to meet you! I am so happy to participate in this challenge- I LOVE them and it has been quite sometime since I did them. I laughed on your comment on my post because I used to moderate message boards too – ha ha it all comes full circle doesn’t it? My Hubs works in heavy equipment at a rock quarry and they are lucky that they have just got kept on especially at some points in the last few years. things are picking up for them right now and they are getting tons of overtime and such!
Awesome about your crafty fame too- my mom is a crafty gal and she makes ALL THE THINGS CRAFTY … I however cannot draw a stick person…My mom tried to be a vendor at a event and didn’t sell anything so ever since she has been bummed. Believe me I was at the event and I told her that it wasn’t her- no one there did well so.. hopefully she will perk up again!