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Photo by ThinkPanama
One of the keys to finding fulfillment, no matter what our station in life, is to love ourselves. To accept ourselves. To recognize that we’re not perfect, but we’re not terrible. We’re trying, and that says a lot—and most of all, we’re people of value.
I think this is especially important because really, valuing motherhood begins with mothers valuing themselves. We have to set the precedent for our families. Yes, we serve them and we break our backs to keep them happy and healthy—but at the same time, we teach them to respect others, respect themselves, respect us—and respect motherhood.
We must value ourselves as mothers. We must recognize and embrace this high and holy calling, and then help our families and those around us to learn to value us as individuals and as mothers, and to value motherhood and the things we’ve done for them.
Of course, some of us have an easier time of loving ourselves:
But, then, I think this shows us what a key time childhood is. If we work to instill this value for motherhood in our children now—if we show them that we love them and serve them, but we also value ourselves as individuals, and if we teach them to value themselves—we can get a jumpstart on the negative messages that are sure to come.
What do you think? How do you show your children that you value motherhood, and yourself? How do you teach your children to value you as their mother?
A few weeks ago, Ryan (and our neighbors) took Hayden on his first camping trip.
Although he wasn’t interested in eating marshmallows that were all “mewty,” and, thus, s’mores, though he whined about coming home pretty much all night, and despite one smashed finger, Hayden pretty much loved it.
He’s asked to go camping almost every weekend since then.
Any fun firsts for you lately?
Choosing happiness. It’s been a bit of a theme for the year—one of my resolutions, one of our Group Writing Projects (oh, man, looks like it’s about time for one of those again). It’s something we hear about a lot.
And now I finally know what it means.
Surprisingly, it has a lot to do with why, when I talk about how heart-rendingly difficult stay-at-home motherhood can be, people tell me I should get a job.
It’s because we don’t know how to be happy.
Choosing to be happy does not mean that we will automatically be happy all the time. It doesn’t mean we always choose whatever might make us happy right this second.
Choosing happiness means we choose the things we know are most important for our long term happiness.
The analogy that keeps springing to my mind is one of food. I like donuts and ice cream and cake and pie . . . I could go on, but you get the idea. Food does make me happy, treats especially. I do the grocery shopping, so if I wanted to, I could stock up on these things every week and eat them every meal.
But I can’t choose cake and ice cream all the time. Yeah, I’d enjoy eating it (to a point), but I would soon get sick, gain weight, and miss out on vital nutrients. (Scurvy, anyone? Oh and PS tooth decay?)
To be happy with my body (liking how I look) and happy in my body (not feeling like crap), I have to make healthier choices. I do enjoy eating healthier foods, too, though not as much as my sugary treats.
The same goes for my day-to-day activities. I could ignore my kids all day, plunk myself down in front of the computer and them in front of the TV (where we are now, thank you), but we all end up grumpy and lazy.
Choosing happiness means doing what I may not want to do most right now—it means choosing the thing that I know is right for me, what’s important in the long run.
Staying home with my children all day may not be an endless delight for me. There are diapers and housekeeping and tantrums and nap strikes. But I believe the most important contribution a person can make to the world is to raise their children right, to show them love, to give them their personal attention. I know that in twenty years, my successful marketing campaigns won’t be what warms the cockles of my heart.
By choosing to raise my children myself, I’m choosing a long, hard road—but one that leads to real, long-term happiness.
What do you think? Are you giving up treats today so you don’t vomit tomorrow?
(More thoughts on how to choose happiness as a mom here.)
Photo by Swamibu
Completely unrelated note: Have you heard about the FTC’s recent rule change? The changes have been coming since June, when we first discussed whether compliance and ethics lawyer, for his legal interpretation of the guidelines.
We’ve already looked at how to find keywords for your blog, and how to use them to try to get search engine rankings. Today, for the last post in our series on keywords, we’re going to learn about tracking our keywords to see our success—or find areas where we could use more work.
My favorite ways to track keywords are through my web analytics programs. I use Google Analytics for my blogs. In GA, the Keywords report is under Traffic Sources>Keywords. here, they assemble all the keywords from all search engines to show the most popular keywords for your blog.
A number of other analytics packages also list the keywords people are using to find your site—103 bees, sitemeter, etc. etc.
The Quick Guide to Google Analytics for Bloggers (free PDF) has a little more on this, but here are a few new hints.
The Keywords report is found under Traffic Sources. (I’ve also added this report to my Dashboard, so I can see my top few terms whenever I log in.)
At the top of the page, there’s a nice little graph that shows off how much traffic you get from keywords. It’s pretty, but it’s not that informative. The report, below, is what we want to focus on.
Naturally, I’ve left out a lot of my “personal” data, but you get the gist: this shows how many visits you get, how long people coming from these keywords spend on your site, how many of them have never visited before, and how many of them “bounce” (leave after viewing one page). And, of course, the list of keywords people are actually using to find your site is pure gold.
But there’s way more to learn from this report. If you’ll notice, there’s a pull-down menu by the word “Keyword.” Open it and click on Landing Page.
Now, instead of the keywords people are using, you can see what pages on your site they’re going to:
(Want to know more about a specific keyword? Click on it to “drill down,” and you can even see things like where people are from that type in that keyword, what browser they’re using, how big their screen is. No joke.)
Also, if you register with Google Webmaster Tools and verify your site, they provide a report of the top queries used to reach your site—and where your site ranks for those terms. Very useful—that way, you can see how much room for improvement you have, and better choose which keywords to work on.
This report is on the default GWT dashboard for your site as well as under Your site on the web > Top search queries .
You can also find out what sites linking in to yours are using for their anchor text (the text of the link) under Your site on the web > Links to your site > Anchor text.
Also, you can learn more about how Google sees your site with the Keywords report (Your site on the web > Keywords), which lists the 200 most common keywords Google finds when it crawls your site.
Now, of course, there are tradeoffs for this. You may be granting Google access to a lot of data and tracking by using these tools. If you’re not comfortable with that, there are other solutions that don’t use Google. Yahoo Site Explorer, for example, offers lots of information on incoming links.
What do you think? What do you use to track keywords on your site? What kind of reports do you find most useful?
This series has been a simplified beginners’ guide to using keywords. It’s not a substitute for professional search engine optimization or professional SEO advice. Yeah, I can give those, but I’m a little busy these days, so I’m not really pitching my own services today.
Keys by Kit
Hey, it’s the first Saturday of the month. That means it’s time to measure your darlings from the last month and pick the one you love best—and add it to the party at the Saturday Evening Blog Post at Elizabeth Esther. I picked Watering our grass (again, which has nothing to do with our neighbors calling the police on our lawn), about what we do to make the grass greener on our side of the fence.
What post will you choose?