Writing, Blogging, and Making Time for Homeschool….again

January 12, 2012Jenny Marie Hatch Leave a comment

For eight years during the 90’s I was one big lactating mass of motherhood.

I started nursing Allison in Jan of 92 and did not stop until eight years later when Andrew turned 3 in the fall of 99.

I have always been a diligent journal writer and some of my best stuff has been written while in the throes of new mother sleep deprivation. Most of the content for my first three books was captured from my personal journals written during those early years mothering my older children. It sort of became a running joke in my journal that I would begin the entry by writing, “I should be washing dishes right now, but I feel like writing.”

I can promise you reader, the dishes did eventually get done, but I am so grateful that I had the focus back then to lay housework aside every once in a while and share what was in my heart in the pages of those journals.

This morning I awoke at four am and found myself feeling the same old tug, to go to the computer and start typing…

When Andy, the baby in the above picture, was three, I weaned him on his third birthday. I had weaned Jeff at the same time and for consistencies sake, decided to stop on September 7th, 1999. Three weeks after the wean I had this burst of emotional, mental, and physical creativity hit my body and mind like a tornado of renewal and force. It was real and I realized how much of my own energy and essence had been invested into my children during those eight years of on demand, baby led, LLL Style, breastfeeding.

As the energy hit the Holy Spirit whispered, “NOW it is time to write Jen”. I had experienced many spiritual promptings during those years that I was supposed to write about Mothering and continually felt frustrated that I did not have the time or energy to write anything more than a few paragraphs every couple of days.

I began with my first book A Mothers Journey. Every morning I would wake up at four am, sneak down to the basement where our family computer was stashed and start typing. I would type for an hour or two until the children woke up and then I would begin my day of mothering. I found that I was able to edit with the family around, but I could not find the mental energy to type unless if it was quiet and I was alone undisturbed…

Thus began my writing adventures. I feel like I should insert here that I am not a writer. I don’t have any training in writing and make many grammatical and speling errors in my books and blog posts. I also don’t have much time for editing and perfecting of books and posts. All of my books, blog posts, and comments on the internet are riddled with typos and a general smashing of the English Language. And my ability to communicate has constantly been questioned by those English Teacher trolls who generally have nothing to add to a debate beyond, “Hey Jenny Hatch, you suck as a writer because you mispeled a word.” I usually ignore these people as a waste of my precious time, but it does get annoying, they seem to think that those of us sharing on the web have to pass some certified test of grammer and syntax and word usage and editing and punctuation!!!!! if we don’t we are somehow not worthy to rite or share our thoughts on the web. Rong! We Mom Bloggers are just as able and willing to add decent web Kontent to the Marketplace of Idears as anyone in the werld.

As the years passed and I found myself engaging more and more on the web, I really questioned the amount of time spent debating, writing, and posting. Was this important? Should I deep clean the bathroom more often? I justified my time spent on these endeavors by thinking about how much my words would have meant to new Mama Jenny Hatch when I was getting started in my mothering. Back in the 80’s I had to spend copious amounts of time at the local library doing research and requesting inter library loaned books to find the information that I was seeking about Natural Mothering.

The web had not been thought of and blogging was a distant dream hidden in shadows. Whenever I typed those heartfelt posts and books, I always thought of the young mom surrounded by medical insanity who was being told to ignore every instinct towards what was natural and healthy by everyone around her. I wrote for her and for her children.

This past summer I took a huge blogging break to spend more precious time with my oldest daughters who were preparing to leave home for College. I had the thought, I will spend more time on my blog when Ben starts third grade. I have invested 22 years into my family and although we had homeschooled him last year, I was determined to “get my day back” and have hours and hours to spend perfecting these little happy homes on the web known as The Natural Family Blog and Blogging Mothers Magazine.

Life sometimes demands something different.

Last week Ben stopped attending our local elementary and is now home. And I once again find myself in the roll of homeschooling Mother. Our local school was not a good fit for him and we lost our slot at the Charter when he pulled out last year. So many conflicting thoughts swirling around in my head. The main thing I find myself mourning is just the luxury of time alone, time to think, time to enjoy the quiet and a less hectic day. Its not like spending time with an eight year old is one big neverending morass of pain and suffering, but it will “rob” me of hours that could have been spent in more creative pursuits, like the ultimate three minute You Tube, or the most hilarious spoof on hospital birth every created that goes viral in less than eight hours, and the most enlightening and inspiring post ever conceived on the joys of Orgasmic Birth.

I can see these posts and videos in the distance….waving at me, but an eight year old needs his mom, and now my boys at Seminary will be walking in the door in about fifteen minutes and they will be wanting breakfast, and a pile of laundry and dishes is calling to me from the corners of the house…..”Jeeeennnnnnyyyy, come wash me, come clean me, come organize me…..” And I have to relagate blogging back to the shadows of my life as I FOCUS on the needs of one of the most precious people in my life.

It is now 6:39 am. Time to stop typing and time to start Mothering. I’ll be back, but no promises about ANYTHING. If I miss a month or two publishing the magazine, or I don’t post for a couple days…you will know that I am helping with a Saxon Math lesson, going on a field trip to the mountains, or visiting a museum with my son. And what I really think about it…who cares if I spend five hours a week blogging instead of fifteen hours or twenty or thirty? How many times can you zing the medicos for the dismal way they do EVERYTHING??? Wether I say it in thirty words or six hundred, the message is the same.

Grab your Sovereignty Mama, and NEVER let it go!

Gotta make some oatmeal….

Jenny Hatch

6th Anniversary

July 4, 2011Jenny Marie Hatch Leave a comment

Just about exactly 6 years ago I was publishing the Introduction to this Blog.

After months of research and preparation I published the post on the evening of July 4th, 2005.

Independence Day was a symbol of how I felt about my work on the Internet, and it felt right to begin this adventure on my favorite holiday.

I had been participating on the internet since 1997, and had begun with a web site called Millennial Family in 1999. It feels like a lifetime has slipped by since those early years of figuring out how to share my story…

I snail mailed my first book to five publishers and they all rejected it. My brother Dave helped convince me to publish the book on the internet as an E Book. When I think about those early efforts to convert my Word file to a PDF without the formatting being lost in transition, I have to laugh thinking about the same problems cropping up 14 years later when publishing Word files to Kindle, Nook, or Smashwords. (Note to anyone interested – DON’T even bother putting your word file into a PDF before publishing on Kindle…just save it as a Rich Text Format (RTF), and publish away – it will look best on all hand held devices as an RTF *This is a publishing tip that Independent Writers can take to the bank)

During those early years of writing, I wrote so many sentences with a baby nursing on my lap that I believe I could win a one hand typing contest. Paul purchased an awful digital camera and I spent hours uploading pictures to share cooking tips with Mom Readers. When my daughter purchased a digital camera with video in 2007, I “rented” it from her to create Cooking and Provident Living Blog entries. I recently remixed all of those old videos at One True Media and uploaded them to You Tube to use as content for the most recent issue of Blogging Mothers Magazine.

I don’t particularly like making movies with the equipment we have here at home and have vowed I won’t make any more movies until I can buy a decent camera. I don’t regret learning how to make digital movies, it’s just that I could make them so much better and faster with real professional equipment.

I’m grateful to have made it safely to this day and give Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ all of the thanks for making that happen. This adventure has been unexpectedly difficult and many, many times I walked away vowing never to come back. But I am still here and believe that because I owe my life to the Perfect Grace of my God, I should respond in kind by mustering on as well as I can manage.

To my enemies I say, Karma is real and what goes around does indeed come around. To my friends and readers, thank you for sticking with me for all of these years. To my beloved Family who have endured more than their fair share of distress because of my writing, I probably never would have started this endeavor if I had known how it was really going to be, but I am grateful that all of you are still here with me, relatively healthy and whole, and that Heavens Blessings have kept us alive and safe when at times it felt as if the whole world was crashing down on my head.

Here is to another six years of The Natural Family Blog!

Jenny Hatch

On Blogging, Traffic, Blog Hosts, and Unique Visitors…

June 30, 2011Jenny Marie Hatch Leave a comment

Disclosure: I receive financial compensation from Fatcow Web Hosting Services for every person who signs up for web services through an affiliate program – Jenny Hatch

When I was preparing to write this blog back in 2005, I spent a few months researching to figure out the most straightforward way to proceed.

I had used the services of an excellent web design company in Boulder to set up my first site at Natural Family Co and when I was ready to go, I called my web designer and asked him who had the best blog software and what was the best way to host the blog.

He told me that my web hosting company,Fatcow had a blog platform that they could easily install Movable Type onto, and that it was the best software for Blogging.

***NOTE*** Fatcow offers amazing technical support as well as help setting up your Blog using WordPress, the acknowledged best Blogging Platform on the Web! With Free Domain Registration and unique features including email, unlimited bandwidth, and an affordable monthly fee (usually under $5.00 a month), this Green company that is powered by Wind Technology is ready to help you begin your Blogging Adventures Today! I have used the Fatcow services for over ten years and they are the best! *** Jenny Hatch ***

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I took his advice to heart and thus began the most frustrating side to my blogging adventures. Movable Type was designed by Programmers who know terms like Perl, CSS, and html. I purchased the book HTML for Dummies and used it a few times to help me learn how to do certain functions. But if I was not married to my husband Paul, a computer genius, I would have given up that first year.

It did not help matters that soon after I began Blogging my site was continually spammed with nasty comments, trackbacks, and pings, and the most revolting porn and drug ad comments were hitting me day after day after day making conversations nearly impossible. I have since read about other alternative health care bloggers who have had the same thing happen, up to and including sites torn down, especially sites that talk about alternatives to Chemotherapy, and computers hacked so bad they had to be replaced.

Conversely Mom Bloggers like Dooce who continually hold up Allopathic Medicine as the supposed savior of her life in the form of anti depressants and who use vaccines for every known disease for her and her children, have traffic and advertisers out the wazoo.

Not complaining, I understand the various forces at work attempting to disrupt the flow of information on the web.

Movable Type proved nearly impossible for me to edit and once, I lost all of my content as I attempted to change the CSS format into something that looked a little more colorful. Paul helped me find my blog posts after I made that costly mistake and I just reconciled myself to the fact that the type of blog platform I had chosen would not be edited by me and I could not hire anyone to help me make it more beautiful because of a lack of money.

Despite the lack of beauty on my blog, traffic was great, and I consistently had 40,000 unique visitors coming to my site every month. Those who came in for a look often stayed to click around quite a bit and my hits were always at the 400,000 mark. It was not a “high” traffic blog by technorati standards, but I was happy.

In 2009 I had an advertiser express interest in embedding a widget on my blog. I had the technical ability to install pictures with links as ads, but was dismayed by the my lack of ability to install widgets. Thus began my education about widgets, sidebars, flash players, and the various blogging platforms that could or could not host my advertisers content.

I made the difficult decision during the summer of 2009 to pull the Unassisted Childbirth Conference videos that I had hosted on my web site off the web and upload a free version of the conference on You Tube. I eventually uploaded all of the videos in January of 2010 as an offering to the Holistic Birth Community. It had been costing me quite a bit every month to pay hosting fees for the videos and I just could not afford the monthly drain on our family budget…

In November of 2009 I made the almost impossible decision to download all of my blog archives and begin again on this WordPress Platform. The reason this decision was so difficult is because I knew that I would lose most of my traffic and all of my links would become invalid. I was not aware of how many people were coming into my blog because of postings in chat rooms and email lists. After making the change I realized that over 95 % of my traffic was from search engines and all of those links were invalid. It literally made me sick to lose all of that traffic when I had worked so hard to write and produce multimedia that others found valuable.

Recently I went into my blog archive from the old movable type platform and looked at my traffic from the past year. It still records who is coming in, who referred them, and what they are attempting to look at, even though the post is gone. I was again disheartened to learn that 240,183 unique visitors had come in trying to find my posts over the past year and every single one of those people had been turned away. I also had a total of 524,839 hits to my blog, again resulting in INTERNAL SERVICE ERROR replies to my potential readers.

This past month a post I did on that former blog platform called Jennys Flu Soup, which I cross posted at Free Republic was the high traffic post of the month. 1,659 people wanted to access my blog to get more information about my soup recipe and it was not there for them to read. UUUGGGGHHHHhhhh!!!

I have now been happily blogging at WordPress for over a year and my total unique visitor count is 44,586. Wordpress does not indicate unique visitors vs. hits in the stats. I suspect that number is just hits, although it could be unique visitors, I don’t know. The point is my traffic has NEVER recovered from the change and it just makes me sad.

I quickly learned that while WordPress has amazing features regarding embedding widgets and installing videos in blog entries, Blogger has some nice features as well. So last year I created a Blogger version of this blog and every once in a while I import all of my recent posts to keep it updated. Changing my archives from movable type to wordpress to blogger is a story that would take a book to write, it was not easy and made for a very difficult transition. Those archived posts on Blogger all look a little screwy, but the words and some of the links are still the same for those who want to wade through that maze of formatting hell.

Do I have any advice for a Mom who is just beginning her blogging career?

Sure.

If you are looking to just journal your life and import pictures of your family to later be made into a book, use Blogger. It is so easy to use.

If you are writing a blog that is for technical or professional use and want to really impress your associates and include advertising on your site, use the services of a Professional Web Hosting Company like Fatcow to create a polished, amazing finished product with WordPress as the Blogging Platform. Wordpress allows you to upload your multimedia content in text, audio, video, and still pictures to share with readers. Wordpress also has Comment Sections that can be hooked up to Facebook and Twitter Accounts so that your blog will immediately be published on your favorite social media sites!

I have used them exclusively for many years to host my web site, and love the technical service, it really cannot be beat!

If you are writing a blog that is meant to poke the powers that be, disrupt the flow of dollars and resources currently flooding into the coffers of the New World Order, then for sure, use WordPress to smack them at every juncture.

Use Fatcow services to re register your domain every year (Mine is WWW.JennyHatch.com) and every week or so save your posts in a file that is not contained in your computer so that you can easily and within minutes be back on the web posting when they hack your site, flood your home computer with viruses, and mangle the files stored on your laptop.

You can also have several blogs “waiting in the wings” all ready to go, so that if they tear down your site, you can easily make those blogs hosted at Live Journal, Blogger, Posterous, and WordPress go live the second they pull your content off the web. I have designed several blogs to serve this purpose in my life should the powers that be attempt once again, to pull down this site.

It comforts me to know that my voice will be heard even if they manage to hack and attack to the point where I am completely disabled…

Don’t assume that every “alternative” news outlet will be willing to host your content. When I began blogging, Pajamas Media was happy to post quite a bit of my content on the site. Then shortly after I had sent along that very post on Alternative Remedies for Flu, which they used, they would not accept any more of my stuff and I noticed a Theraflu ad prominently posted on the site a few weeks after not accepting any more posts.

Free Republic has been the most willing site to host my content these past 6 years. Huffington Post has also hosted a few of my citizen journalism reports, and I have had content posted at The Bitter Pill since Amy Philo invited me to be a guest blogger at the site. These sites are all way more popular than they used to be and all you can do as a blogger is send your links to them and hope that they will post and in the case of Free Republic, not pull your content off once it is published.

I also started writing for Blog Critics Magazine last year and although they only published about half of what I sent to them, they were willing to publish a few of my articles.

No money has been involved in any of these collaborations. I blog because I love to write and I am PASSIONATE about my content. I would love to make a few more dollars from my writing, but selling one book a month on amazon and getting ten or fifteen dollars every now and again for an ad placement is about all I am making at this juncture. It does pay my web hosting fees, so for now I am content.

When you pick fights with the wealthiest people on the planet, it does tend to ensure that the advertising dollars do not come flowing like a spigot into your bank account. I read that Dooce gets $40,000.00 a month from her advertisers. I wish her well and hope that her blog continues to be a cash cow for her family.

I will not accept ads from companies that poison and intoxicate families.

So, if you have a nice business dedicated to helping families be healthy, consider advertising on The Natural Family Blog. If not, happy trails…

Jenny Hatch

Back in the Saddle

June 19, 2011Jenny Marie Hatch Leave a comment

I’ve done this blogging break thing for just about every year that I have been writing since 2005. It is always a good time to retrench, evaluate, and really consider if this is a project I should spend quality time on.

It takes me three weeks to decompress and decide if I want to continue on once I stop.

Generally I go back and forth trying to decide and am always sorely tempted to delete every word I have ever written on the web, and just move on with my life.

But I feel rested and ready to jump back into the digital pool…

Jenny Hatch