Happy 1st Blogoversary
Wish us a happy 1st blogoversary. Or rather, wish us a happy belated 1st blogoversary. By ten days.
As I was planning out today’s blog, I realized that it was around this time last year that I’d taken over the Kars4Kids blog, so I did a quick check and saw that my first blog post in this space actually dates back to February 16, 2014. That was an exciting time for me. I had this idea that I was going to take the blog into a whole new direction.
It wasn’t going to be another mommy blog *groan*
Nor would it be a blog about education, though educating kids is the primary focus of Kars4Kids.
What I really wanted to do was create a place where parents could be educated in their craft. This wouldn’t be a catch-all place for tips on getting tomato sauce stains out of white blouses, or how to get kids to stay dry at night. Rather, I wanted this space to be a sort of online university for parents, where they could go more deeply into the psyche of the parent-child relationship and get good, solid, current information on topics that concern today’s parents.
A Bold Move
It was a bit of a bold move, and I thank my manager, Mrs. Wendy Kirwan, for giving me a long leash. The sort of readership I aimed to attract was not our natural readership, but one I hoped to attract with the content offered on the blog. I was banking on bringing a more thoughtful parenting crowd to the blog with the idea I’d be creating a working partnership between the goals of the Kars4Kids organization and bright and curious parents who take their parenting seriously.
Kars4Kids does what a lot of parents can’t and that is provide for all the educational needs of their children, because kids need a lot more education and stimulation than that provided in a typical classroom. This is the place where K4K steps in and makes things happen for kids who aren’t as fortunate as some. And the thing is, when you help someone get what you already have, it doubles your brownie points in this world.
That’s the message we wanted to put across. Helping to share what we have with others, because it takes a village to raise goodhearted, well-rounded children.
Expert Advice
We’ve tried to bring in expert advice, by interviewing those in the know, such as Amie Valpone, Annie Fox, and Sue Atkins. We offered space to guest contributors such as Amy Williams, Heather Barr-Cohnen, Saara Moskowitz, Sharon Ugowitz, Sally Kuzemchak, and Melissa Chapman. And we talked to mothers with unique perspectives, people like Shanell Mouland whose blog about her daughter and the kindness of a stranger went viral, and writer Avital Norman Nathman who spoke to the myth of the good mother. We interviewed Brad Cohen, whose life story as a teacher with Tourette syndrome was made into a movie.
We also brought on a second writer, one with sterling credentials as an educator, Merle Huerta, who has added immeasurably to the success of this blog with her interesting and forthright perspectives on parenting. Merle and I grew up together and I just knew we’d make a sparkling writing team, each of us contributing our individual strengths to the blog. I was right and the addition of Merle to the writing team has raised the level of the blog up several notches.
Our dream is for this space to attract many, many readers, by bringing the kind of content we believe parents want, but cannot easily find elsewhere. At the same time, we’ve also tried to be a basic resource of sorts, by offering information on little known issues as Spatial Awareness Difficulties, and college-level education theory, such as Piaget’s Conservation Tasks, for instance. We haven’t shied away from such painful topics as “What to Do When Your Child is Arrested.” We’ve talked about learning disabilities and nutrition, language development and stranger danger, about kindness, mental illness, choosing a babysitter, drugs, PTSD, and so much more.
Comments?? We LOVE Comments!
Now every blogger worth her salt wants COMMENTS and PAGE VIEWS. Well, it took awhile, but we did finally begin to get page views and even a few comments, too! We feel we haven’t done too badly, and in fact, we’re pretty proud of our combined effort and what we have achieved here (if you haven’t spent much time here, we hope you’ll take some time to look around the website).
We hope you like the content we’re serving up and if you do, hey! Don’t be shy. Tell us about it. Comments are a blogger’s lifeblood. We LIVE for comments.
Hint, hint.