Born To Blog | Table for Five

Maximum Holiday Stress Has Been Reached

December 14, 2011 By Elizabeth

The holidays stress me out. They have for as long as I’ve been a Mom. This year has been even more stressful than usual, I think because I’m creating a lot of stress for myself due to my complete lack of ability to organize. Organize what?, you ask? EVERYTHING. I am the most unorganized person in my entire family. Which is probably why no one EVER says “let’s get together at Elizabeth’s house”.

When I say that my New Year’s Resolution is to get organized, I MEAN IT. I can’t go on living this way. My family can’t go on with me living this way. I have no system in place for organizing my blogging, my household responsibilities, my emails, my life in general! And now it’s the holidays, Christmas is in 11 days, I haven’t even ordered Christmas cards let alone started gathering the addresses, I haven’t wrapped a single present, it’s just all a big mess.

In fact, Chris and the kids decorated the tree, a job I usually love, while I sat on the couch deleting emails. There’s a tub sitting here in the living room full of my snowman collection that I haven’t even unpacked. Kaitlyn needs a book for her class gift exchange tomorrow that I haven’t even bought, and Nathan has a band concert tonight.

I know what tools I could use to accomplish all of this. I have paper calendars, online calendars, a huge dry erase board in the kitchen. I have a family willing to help me with anything I ask, which makes me so grateful. But they can only help me if I know WHAT I need help with, you know?

Also? It’s been 6 1/2 years that I’ve been writing this blog, and I think it’s time for me to make a change. I started out writing about everything that was happening to us on pretty much a daily basis, and then it became more professional, and now I think it’s time to get it back to being personal.

I guess I’ve been worried that if I was “real”, I would lose the advertisers and the brand campaigns and what have you. But the thing is, I want people who read this blog to know who I really am, faults and all. The truth is, I’m foul-mouthed and snarky and critical. I care about politics and education and gay marriage and drug laws. I’ve been reading Entertainment Weekly for 20 years and know a ridiculous amount of trivia about TV shows and movie stars. But I don’t write about any of that!

So, that’s my real New Year’s Resolution – get organized and get systems in place so that this time next year I’m ENJOYING the holidays instead of stressing out about them. Can you relate? Are you feeling it too? Tell me in a comment that it’s not just me!

Stress is not invited to my Christmas (christiansciencebc.com)
[Blisstree] Holiday Stress: 10 Things To Avoid Talking About At Christmas Dinner (blisstree.com)
Signs of a holiday meltdown (cnn.com)

Filed Under: Welcome to my Life Tagged With: Born to Blog, Christmas 2011, holiday stress

What Would Elizabeth Do? This.

May 22, 2011 By Elizabeth

So. You are probably wondering just what the heck is going on here. If you are one of my fabulous regular readers, you’ve seen a couple of posts in the last few days that might have you scratching your head wondering what I am up to. Posts that aren’t what you are used to seeing here on Table for Five.

I’m going to explain why.

Chris gets paid every other Wednesday, and his last check hit our account on the 18th. I dropped Kaitlyn off at preschool that morning, then went to the credit union, withdrew the money for the mortgage and the car payment, then hit BOA for the one and CASE Credit Union for the other.

That evening after dinner he and I collected all the bills and sat down to start paying them. Chris logged into online banking to see if there were any withdrawals we had missed, and got a surprise.

We had $400 in our checking account.

We had been NEGATIVE when his check hit, then I took out the mortgage and car payment, and whammo, we were down to $400. For two weeks. For five people to live on. Including buying gas for our van which is our only running vehicle, which Chris drives all the way to Jackson and back on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and which I use on Mon-Wed-Fri to drive him to carpool and then to drive K to preschool and back plus any errands I need to run. It’s about $80 for a full tank each week.

So. I had already bought my ticket for Gleek Retreat, told Deb I would pick her up and drive her there and back, and that I would pay her for my half of the room charge. And, I really really wanted to go, and Chris really wanted me to go.

I did the only thing I could think of to make fast money legally. No, not that. Or that either.

I searched my inbox for any emails requesting to have guest articles including links placed here on Table for Five. I offer that service on my Advertise page, and I was just hoping someone had made a request.

And that is how a post about the the German site for Groupon, a post about the symptoms of Dengue Fever and the importance of killing mosquitos, and a post about a safe way to trap mice came to be on this blog.

Normally, I would have replied back and politely declined because those topics don’t relate to parenting, but in this case, I just plain needed the money. It’s that simple. And yes, it made me feel kind of weird, but I did what I had to do so I wasn’t taking any money away from the little we have to live on.

I’m telling you this because I want readers to know that sometimes, blogging is about making tough decisions. Every blogger I know has had to do it at some point. Whether it’s deciding to post something controversial, or delete a comment, or accept a job for the money, it’s something every blogger could eventually face.

The other reason I’m telling you this is because while I’m sure it was clear from the title “Guest post” and the words “sponsored by” in those posts, I wanted to be completely transparent and explain why I chose to post something that must have seemed so completely random. I fully believe in the opening words of the Blog with Integrity pledge – By displaying the Blog with Integrity badge or signing the pledge, I assert that the trust of my readers and the blogging community is important to me.

So, if you ever are facing a tough decision like that, just ask yourself, What Would Elizabeth Do? If you’re still not sure, email me. I’ll talk you through it

Filed Under: Born to Blog, Stuff I think about Tagged With: Born to Blog, making money with a blog, paid blogging, paid links

I Really Need to Un-Complicate My Online Life

May 16, 2011 By Elizabeth

Webtreats 3d Glossy Blue Orbs Social Media Icons

Image by webtreats via Flickr

My online life is just way too complicated, people. I don’t know what made me think I could handle three blogs, three Facebook accounts, four Twitter streams, three email addresses. At first I thought I was “organizing” the information, but man, is it hard to keep with all of them!

The thing about social media for me is that it feels so…important. Meaning, I feel like if I delete a Twitter account, the 37 people who added me to a Twitter list will see that my account is gone and, I don’t know, dislike me? Obviously I understand the overall importance of social media, but I also am thinking that over-saturation is much less effective.

Is it really necessary, for example, to have four Twitter accounts? I started with one, @Table4Five, then decided MomReviews needed it’s own Twitter stream for tweets and retweets about reviews and giveaways. And then I decided that MomCooks needed IT’S own Twitter stream for tweets about the reviews and giveaways I was doing there.

Ask me how well I’m managing to keep those four Twitter streams up to date. I’ll give you a hint – I’m NOT. Besides the huge headache I gave myself last year just before BlogHer when I suddenly decided my old Twitter for Table4Five was too crowded and I needed a SECOND Table4Five twitter account where I could have more personal conversations. Now I have @Table4Five, the newly renamed @ElizabethT45 (used to be called @Table4Five2, and trust me, it confuses me too), @MomReviews and @mom_cooks. GAH.

Facebook is actually not that unmanageable. I have my main account for myself, then I have fan pages for Table for Five and MomReviews. MomCooks doesn’t have it’s own fan page, which is fine by me. I have RSS for each blog going to it’s respective fan page, and every once in a while I check in to see if there are messages or friend requests. Facebook is the least stressful of my online identities really.

A brand consultant I “met” through LinkedIn gave me a very interesting piece of advice, based only on looking at my three blogs. She said that what I should do is rename MomReviews to Table for Five Reviews and Giveaways (anyone see why that’s a problem?) and MomCooks to Table for Five Cooks. But here’s the thing – can a four year old blog really be renamed? What happens to all of the posts?

The problem is that the title of a blog is in the permalink to every one of it’s posts, categories, tags, and archives. Like this: http://momcooks.net/2011/04/25/ham-pasta-skillet-recipe/. If I changed the name of MomCooks to something like Table for Five Cooks, and someone copy/pasted an old momcooks link into Google, it would give them a 404 “page doesn’t exist” error. MomCooks has 467 published posts, so that’s a whole lot of errors.

And of course the problem with the suggestion for MomReviews is that there is already a blog titled Table for Five Reviews and Giveaways, as I discovered last year.

I love Table for Five, and I love MomReviews. I can’t see a logical way to combine them. MomCooks I really just use for a place to copy/paste recipes I find online rather than printing them out on paper, and the advertising pays for the annual domain name registration, so it’s not costing me anything out of pocket to keep it.

So what’s the solution? Do I keep everything I have and just try to update it the best I can, when I can? How are you handling multiple online accounts?