The night after we pulled his tooth out I heard him crying in his bed. When I asked him what was wrong his tears turned into a full on sob.

“I just want my tooth back in my mouth. I just want everything to go back to normal.”

It took all the strength in the world not to say “me too” and curl up with him and cry.

Things move too fast.

I have been thinking about going back to school. Actually, I have never stopped thinking about going back to school but I think I found a program I might actually want to do. A program that would work with my current life schedule. I am not ready to tell you what the program is but I can tell that if you thought I was crazy for getting a Philosophy degree? You are going to totally lose your mind on this one.

Last weekend I started working on my entrance essay and found myself pouring on to the page words that I didn’t know I had in me. What came out of it was a twenty-page memoir type essay about a story that I have spent the past five years trying to figure out how to tell.

I want to tell more stories.

Wednesday I wore a dress and tights and was probably over-dressed but I really didn’t care. I took the day off and instead of sitting in my office, building beautiful things and talking to myself, I went to see people! People! I decided that  people seeing required tights and a dress. Because sometimes that is just the way it is.

I really want to re-invent this blog, or maybe delete and start a new blog from scratch. Sometimes I imagine that I could be a food blogger, or a craft blogger or maybe a humor blogger. But then I realize that I would have to learn to cook, or sew, or craft. These feelings aren’t just applicable to this blog, its how I think about my life sometimes too. Maybe I can erase and start anew as a baker, or a musician that travels the country, or maybe even a celebrity. Perhaps, I could be more Paris Hilton like?

It’s not that I don’t enjoy my life, I really do. I just wish there was more consistency in being me. I wish I had a specific talent or hobby or personality trait that perfectly described me. I try to imagine if I were a character in a book who I would be, but I am pretty sure that I wouldn’t fit into a book because my character would be too messy and all over the place. A good friend of mine describes me as “un-categorically strange,” because I can’t even fit into the traditional definitions of strange. I am my own kind of weird, my own kind character and sometimes that is completely annoying.

Today I am linking up with Just Write.

On a completely unrelated note you can find me over here this week talking about what trends we are going to see in the next year. I am also over here talking about How-To get press for your blog. 

Oh 2011, you were so bi-polar.

I considered creating a 2011 recap post with a bunch of pictures from the year. I started thumbing through Facebook to find pictures I could use and most of them looked something like this:

(last New Years Eve. Yes, those are potato chips in my hand)

And this:

(This was taken in March. I was pretending to be Marilyn Monroe–see the resemblance?)

I am really good at photo opps. Clearly.

This year Aiden and I  moved into our first house and took my first full-time job. I traveled to New York, Chicago, Nashville, Palm Springs, New Orleans and San Diego. I wrote a ton, created more powerpoints than I ever imagined possible and watched over 70 episodes of Gossip Girl. (not an easy task) I grew my own food,  got over my fear of public speaking, ate sea urchin, rode in a petty cab and survived Aiden’s first day of kindergarten. I met Drew Brees, Giuliana Rancic, Bob Harper and sat on Melissa Peterman’s lap. I welcomed old friends who came back home, I threw fits, quit speaking to people, made new friends, made up with old friends and became more demanding than I have ever been in my life.

A couple of months ago I went to Camp Mighty and attended a session that talked about intention and how we fit intention into our lives. It occurred to me that this past year I was not at all intentional with the things that I did and the way that I spent my time. I had absolutely no goals or direction other than survival. I was simply existing, wading through the days and hoping good stuff would happen. (and good stuff did happen)

When I was in college my entire  experience was centered around this larger purpose of graduating college. I had this big lofty goal and all I had to do to achieve it was meet with my guidance counselor twice a year and check courses off of a list. At the end of that list was diploma and with that diploma all of my dreams would come true. Right?

 After college there wasn’t any big lofty goal. I wasn’t the only person who spent their first year after college wading in the un-known—none of my friend’s seemed to have a center purpose for their lives either. Ok, there were a few of them who had long ago made it their goal to become President and were now sitting in the background of episodes of c-span but those are a rare breed.

I haven’t set one single goal and because of that I haven’t had any steps in place that were leading in any kind of direction.

2012 is going to be my year of intention.

My goal for 2012 is to set some goals.

I want to ask for lofty things that probably won’t happen but I can at least start building my life to move in the direction I need it to go.

What are your 2012 goals?

“As a PR professional I often get asked about Klout scores and if I use them when choosing the bloggers that we work with. The answer? Yes and no. When you are choosing bloggers to partner with, there are a number of things that go into that choice, one of which being how big of a reach that blogger has. I would never solely look at someone’s Klout score to determine how much influence they have. With access to Twitter, Facebook and Google+, I can look at a number of statistics that show me how large of a reach a blogger has.So againthe question of whether or not Klout is even necessary comes up. If we have access to all of these different stats, why do we need a tool that grades our social presence?”

Read the rest over at She Posts.

Last summer I met Jill from Founding Moms at Tech Week in Chicago. She was an AMAZING speaker and I came home and internet stalked her made sure that I subscribed to all of her updates. She has a great newsletter for mom entrepreneurs that I think every single one of you should subscribe to. Why am I telling you this? Because I got an issue of her newsletter today and everything she linked to was amazing. (Like an opportunity to pitch your products to Good Morning America)

Anyways, you can subscribe here and then magic will show up in your inbox every now and again.

In case you want to see how amazing of a speaker Jill really is:

What else do I have for you?

• My good friend Claire kicked off 12 Days of Giving today and she is also hosting a Twitter for Good un-conference you should sign up for.
• Also? My client GoGo squeeZ is hosting the 12 days of GoGo this week. Head over there and win fun stuff!
• A couple of weeks ago I went to Camp Mighty and this week some of the videos are up. Go watch!
• Babble announced their top 100 mom bloggers today and so many of my friends are on there. This makes me very happy.
• The BEST thing I found all day? Roseanne is on Twitter. Yes, THE Roseanne. However, she is much more angry than I every remember her being…

I never realized how much I read into things until this past year. In a candid conversation with a friend I translated all of the things he said to me and what I actually heard. Following this conversation he referred to me as slightly neurotic and I  really can’t argue with that.

A few weeks ago I was reading about the way people communicate in emails and it got me thinking…

I grew up with the internet.

The first time I flirted with a boy? Yahoo chat rooms. (Go ahead, judge me) The first time I got asked out on a date? MSN messenger. How did I make plans with friends on the weekend? AIM. I grew up learning how to read virtual body language and taking social cues from the way people wrote, the speed of response and the length of response.  Picture me, at the age of fourteen, hunched over my computer trying to figure out if that well placed “….” was a cue for me to say something smart, or if I had confused them, or if they were nervous, or what the hell “….” was supposed to mean.

When I started using the internet for professional reasons I began communicating with people from different generations. Meaning that many of these people didn’t grow up on MSN messenger and weren’t emailing when they were fifteen years old and their style of communicating through text was incredibly different from mine.

So I spent my days trying to decide if their shortened response was because they were annoyed, or busy or if they just hated emailing. I have spent far too much time stressing over whether or not their strategically placed exclamation mark was a sign of excitement or anger.

Needless to say I have been fascinated with the way that people communicate online for far too long. Which makes me wonder how much the way we communicate via email and IM will change as new generations enter the workforce? Studies show that Gen Z will take communicating via instant messenger over email any day, which makes me wonder how inter-office communication will evolve in the next decade.

What do you think?

How do you approach virtual body language?

Do you stress over the way you respond to emails and the responses you receive?

Am I the only one?

First off, can we talk about how great I am at procrastinating? Just for a second? I wrote a list of all of the blog posts I was going to write this week and I wrote three of them last weekend. All I had to do was copy and paste them into WordPress and hit publish. Not a single post has been published this week. That is impressive, no?

I am currently on my way to Camp Mighty. And by on my way I mean I am currently 36,000 feet in the air. There isn’t wi-fi on this plane so I am typing in a word doc and plan to publish this when I land. Let’s see if that actually happens, shall we?

This is me sitting in a sports bar in Denver eating breakfast at 9:00 am. 

I never went to summer camp as a child but I ALWAYS wanted to. And by “ALWAYS wanted to” I mean I kind of thought about it a few times but was too scared to actually go. I had a friend who went to summer camp for
4-H every summer and remember it was torture not being able to speak to her for the decade  week she was gone.

I feel like Camp Mighty will be just like summer camp except there will be palm trees, wine, interwebs AND Maggie Mason which makes it a 100,000 times better than summer camp.

I am a little worried because I haven’t created a life list but maybe this weekend will inspire me to do so. We shall see…

So what brings me to Camp Mighty? I am so glad that you asked! One of my clients (Ecco Domani) is sponsoring the opening night party  to raise a glass to giving. So, do me a favor? Go “Like” Ecco on Facebook and we promise to share some fun content after Camp Mighty. Yay? YAY!

I have more good news! Ready?

A few weeks ago She Posts announced that they were being acquired by a couple of my favorite people in the entire world and I instantly emailed one of them with a big congratulations/telling them how much I wanted to write for them.  They wrote back and were interested! (proof that if you ever want something to just ask for it) I have been a fan of She Posts since it first launched and will now be writing a weekly column for them on the business of blogging. My first post went live today!

If you have any post ideas or specific business blogging questions please send them my way!

 Another random photo to distract you from the numerous random things I am stringing together in this post. 

Lastly, I got an amazing opportunity that I am REALLY excited about. Earlier this week I saw that Penelope Trunk was hosting a blogging bootcamp. I reached out to the people at Brazeen Careerist and they offered me a press pass to attend so that I could share my experience with all of you!

If you are interested in taking your blog to the next level go sign up now and we can take the class together!

Ok, that is all I have for now. I am totally lying I have about five billion other announcements that I will be making in the next week or so but this post is too long already.

Now it is your turn! Tell me, where have you been? What exciting things have been happening? What do you want to hear about?

P.S. If we met at Camp Mighty and you Googled me to see who I was on the interwebs, welcome! I hope you come back often.

This should go well..

Last year I added “Speak to a Crowd” to my list of 56 things to do before I am twenty-five. In the past year I have spoken to many crowds on both panels and solo. What I have found is that I LOVE putting presentations together and I LOVE talking–it’s the big crowd thing that makes me a little nervous. So this year I am powering through and speaking to even more crowds in attempts to face my fear.

As with all presentations I want to make sure this is as helpful as it can be. If you are in the Quad City area leave a comment below with any topics you would like to see covered or any questions you would like answered. If you are not from the Quad City area leave a comment of topics you would like to see covered on my blog.

See? Fun for everyone!

If you don’t want to leave a comment or are un-sure how to feel free to email me your suggestions. 

I can’t wait to meet all of you!

Remember when I started that new feature where I would share fun finds every Friday? How long did you think that would last?

Today is Saturday but I am still posting my fun finds; because I can.

My favorite thing about blogging is that you get to follow a story as it un-folds. This blogger has blogged through so many life moments. Totally fascinated by this. I wonder what moments all of you will get a front row seat to.

I am obsessed with this quote.

This ad is brilliant.

I can’t believe I didn’t find this young mom’s blog before.

This makes me want to cook. Kind of..

I want to buy Aiden all of these books.

I also want a label maker. Like ASAP.

I had fun this week. 

I was inspired to find the most perfect holiday cards.

What did you find this week?

I am pretty sure that this past week really lasted a month. I feel like I have run a marathon and this weekend I plan to do nothing. Hear that? Nothing. I am starting a new thing and every Friday I am going to share with you some of my favorite internet finds from the week. Sound fun? I thought so.

Forget the food porn. This blog? Makes me feel like I could totally be a vegan chef. (minus the vegan part. Oh, and the chef part) Also? Could you think of a better name for a blog? I am going to say no.

I have had this recipe tab open all week because it looked so delicious I didn’t want to lose it. I am going to put it here so I can finally close the tab. Whew!

I have watched this video three times and each time it ended I was in a fit of giggles.

This post made my heart melt. Such a good reminder.

You know all of those times that you wished you had an extra person to schedule an appointment/pay a bill/manage your schedule? You’re welcome.

Go visit my friend.

I am far from a “tech-ie” but I have gotten really interested in the women in tech conversation happening lately. This interview is so inspiring.

This made me mad.

This made me so happy.

Happy Friday friends! What are you doing this weekend?