What inspired you to create your personal blog? What continues to inspire you?

I have always enjoyed keeping a journal of my daily ramblings, thoughts, and rants. I made the shift to blogging in 2005, but all the other cool kids were doing it. Back then, I was on free spaces like LiveJournal and Vox. It was fun to blog about my daily life as well as my opinions and have others read and comment on them. I was inspired to share my life because it made me some great online friends, many that I have known for 4+ years now.

I am continued to be inspired to keep up with my blog because I know have a small following of people online that I feel actually care what I have to say. They have been there to offer advice, sympathy, encouragement, and best wishes. Plus, my blog has also helped me get new products to review in my home that I may never tried out myself.

To celebrate my achievement, I’ll be posting a giveaway tomorrow! I haven’t done one in a while, since none of my past ones have been very popular. This one will be for a gift card, which is a great prize to win this time of year!

My doctor’s appointment on Thursday indicated zero progress. I am still at 2cm, 70% effaced. My doctor believes that I’ve pretty much progressed as much as I am going to on my own. She thinks it will take labor for me to finish dilating and effacing. She did not mention inducing this week, but I am sure she is still considering it. He measured a week ahead yet again, and she keeps commenting on how big of a baby he is going to be. Hopefully he will decide to come on his own before it comes to her wanting to induce me!

Last week I mentioned my mommy blog that I have recently started. I cannot get motivated to update it, so I am not sure if I will keep it going or not. I may just use it to review baby and household products, because I will soon have tons of experience with things in those categories! That will allow me to keep any product reviews off of Southern Girl Ramblings. At first, I thought I wanted to keep my life separately from parenting and Sawyer, but since that will be my life soon, why keep it separate?

I have nothing else to say tonight…maybe I’ll pick up with Project Blog tomorrow.

I took my last Children’s Literature test today, made an 84. Not very happy about it, but I took too long looking through the book for the answers and almost ran out of time. That’s what I get for not actually reading the chapters beforehand! I’m still waiting on two grades to be posted online for that class, but I’m pretty confident I made an A in there. That just leaves me to worry about Statistics. I had a 96 average before taking yesterday’s test, which will not get back before the final tomorrow. I hate that it’s a cumulative final…there’s just too much stuff to pile into one test! My professor gave us a review test though, so hopefully if I look back over it tonight, everything will stay with me until the test in the morning.

So, my new cell phone was supposed to arrive today, but thanks to USPS’s crappy service, the Express Mail I requested (but didn’t pay extra for, thank goodness!) is pretty much meaningless. The package arrived in my city at 11am, was attempted to be delivered at 11:40am (I was at school), and then sat on someone’s truck until closing time today. Around 4pm, the tracking information was updated to say they left a notice. I went by the post office at 3:30pm to try to pick it up, and they said a carrier still had it. Once I saw the update to the tracking, I searched my front porch and mailbox for a notice….there isn’t one out there. Hopefully it won’t be a pain in the butt to go pick it up at the post office tomorrow…

Finishing the semester will also free me up to do better on my blog commenting. I’ve gone 14 days straight with blogging, but I’m slacking on returning comments and cleaning out my Google reader. I hope to remedy both this week. I’d also like to find new blogs to read, as some in my feed reader haven’t been updated in months. It’s always interesting to find new blogs that catch my eye!

While I am writing this, Sawyer is kicking up a storm. He has gotten so much more active within the past 2 weeks. He especially loves to move around in there when I lay down to go to sleep. I’m thinking he may be a night owl like his mama! I love that he moves a lot though, as it lets me know things are okay inside the womb. I am really ready to get to the doctor at the end of this month for the glucose test. I have craved so many carbs this pregnancy that I am worried my sugar may be high. Hopefully things will be okay though!

Through an online gift swap a couple years ago, I received No One Cares What You Had For Lunch: 100 Ideas for your Blog by Margaret Mason. It is just as it sounds: a book of 100 blog writing prompts. While I had every intentions of going through the book and utilizing the prompts, it sat on my desk for a while before becoming a permanent fixture on my bookcase. I found it after reorganizing my entire house last month, and decided I needed to put it to use. It has some very interesting topics to write about in there, and it would definitely help to make my blog more interesting.

I figure there’s no time like the present to begin using the book’s ideas. The blogging project I’m participating offers a writing prompt each day, but I either cannot think of anything to say with that prompt, or I just want to write about something else. Hopefully this book will help me fill in those holes.