When my website crashed, I learned quite a few lessons through the process of trying to get storiesofourboys.com back up. I am going to tell you all about it.

For eleven whole days, storiesofourboys.com was wiped off the face of the internet.

It started on January nineteenth. I woke up to error messages. I had no idea why. After twelve hours of trying to figure it out, I investigated my older wordpress.com version of Stories of Our Boys. Would you believe it? They said my bill was not paid for my domain.

Huh. Who knew?

I did pay the bill, but then I saw some odd activity on my bank account, and I reported it a couple of days before the website crashed. My thought was that for sure the bank will fix this little charge, and all will be well.

Ha! The bank fixed it all right. Turns out it was the fee for my website domain, and WordPress did not appreciate me taking their money away with a bank claim.

Oopsie daisies…my bad.

So WordPress snatched the old rug right out from under me.

Dear WordPress, a little note would have been nice. But I do see how this was also my fault. I should have investigated my bank claim further instead of jumping to conclusions.

The first day of the website crash, I was a miserable mess.

Then after that day of grief I was okay. I knew that if they wanted to help me, they could in fact help , and there would somehow be a way to fix this. Alan kept reminding me that if there were a crime, they would pull up my website like it was nothing.

I found that oddly reassuring.

Sure enough, eleven days later, Bluehost gave me a rescue, and restore my whole website to all of it’s January twelfth glory.

While I was snug in my bed, not thinking about my website at all, a nice person from Bluehost Escalated Support team restored a back-up of my site.

When I awoke this morning, I opened my email, and there was a message from Bluehost letting me know I am back online. Hurray!!

I do believe this calls for a celebration. For quite a few days, I worried ten years of work was down the drain, never to be seen again.

Last night my son Daniel said if I get my website back up, we have to celebrate with a soda and a red velvet cake. I agreed to it, so I guess I owe everyone a little party!

There are a few glitches left, mostly in the form of image loading. I will have to work on that, but at least my website is back!

Here are thirteen lessons I learned from this whole crashed website debacle:

(And honestly I probably learned more than just this.)

1. Make less hasty decisions. Stop and think things through. Don’t claim fraud on a bank charge unless you thoroughly look at it from every angle.

2. I need to take a computer science class, many computer science classes. There is so much more I need to know about website maintenance.

3. Sometimes $19 can get you in a lot of trouble.

4. SSL means secure sockets layer.

5. DNS means domain name system. (It is a little embarrassing that I did not know that before, but I never sat down and thought about it! I never needed to.)

6. You can call up the company you purchased your domain name from to get help when your domain is pointing to the wrong place, and they will fix it for you. Many thanks to mine! Wild West Domains customer support was excellent.

7. Bluehost is helpful. They are my friend.

I am only back up and running thanks to Bluehost. My computer has some back-up elements, but I do not even know where to upload them to. See? I need to go back to school.

All links to Bluehost on this page are now affiliate links because I now wholeheartedly believe in this company and endorse them. If you want to build a website, I do recommend Bluehost.

8. WordPress will swiftly punish you if you put a claim on their charge.

They do not play, nor do they send you a bill and give you an option to pay a different way to fix it as quickly as possible. I had no idea. It took many back and forths before they sent me a link to let me pay with a new method to reinstate my account.

9. WordPress uses automated computers to answer their email support. It worked only okay, so I’m just sharing this information.

10. Did I mention I am going to enroll in computer science 101? I have been building and maintaining my websites since 2013, and there is still too much I do not know that I would like to know.

11. Keep asking for help with the proper channels, and don’t give up.

Bluehost and I had several chats, knocking out one problem at a time. I am so thankful we did not give up.

12. Stay calm and kind during a work crisis. It makes it easier for others to help you.

This may be the first time in my life I was able to stay calm in any kind of crisis. It made a huge difference though. I was able to think more clearly and feel more like a grown-up. Each person I talked to at Bluehost and the domain place thanked me for my patience and kindness. It went a long way.

13. Eventually, God truly will fix your problem in your sleep. God is a refuge to us for real.

It reminds me of that time I prayed about the neighbor who I was avoiding, and God up and moved her across town! Prayer works, y’all. Prayer works.

This concludes my Ted Talk on what happened to me last week. Anyone want to go enroll in community college with me for some computer classes? I think it will be fun!

Thank you for your patience while I get everything all fixed back up. This was embarrassing to go through. I kept thinking about all the people checking my website and thinking I had hung up my blogging hat.

I’m still here, y’all! Thank you for sticking with me! Sorry for the weird problems. I hope you can learn from my mistakes!

If you have any tips for me on the topic of website care, feel free to share below in the comments!

The post So happy to be back! 13 Lessons from When My Website Crashed appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

2020 was my sixth year on storiesofourboys.com. I blogged privately for seven years before that.

This was my most successful year ever, in terms of how many people visited, read, and returned to my blog.

Why though? Did I work harder on it? Write more? Get the word out better?

No no. I worked on blogging a thousand times less over the past three years than I did in 2014, 2015, 2016, or 2017. Those were my hard working blog years. I was much more faithful to write back then. The boys were all younger and not on the internet much. They did not care what photos I used. It was easy.

Then came middle and high school, and I had to change my game. Change, ugh. My followers came for hilarious stories of big family life, not recipes and reviews, but the boys no longer wanted me sharing all those funny stories.

So why was 2020 my most successful year?

The #1 reason was that I had a well-timed, delivered, and much sought-after topic for this one particular post, and Pinterest and Google ran with it. It was this one:

10 Ideas to Make a Quarantine Birthday Fun

I wrote it in mid-March of the pandemic. That was perfect timing because almost no one else had written on this topic, as it was a new world problem.

My ideas were before car parades. Even if we had wanted to have a car parade, it would not have worked for us. We are a military family who had lived in this town less than nine months before the rona even began, so we do not know enough kids to fill up a birthday car parade for our children.

Don’t be sad for us. It was good training.

We are fairly accustomed to being loners, so that made lockdown far less odd to go through. It was not much different than our regular summers at home each year (Virginia years aside, of course).

By August, the girl mom bloggers and magazines with all the pink balloons and fru-fru caught on and wrote their own articles about quarantine birthdays with far more elaborate bells and whistles. Then my page views decreased back down to my regular low level. Ha! But it sure was fun while it lasted.

Reason #2 for the Increase in Blog Readers: I learned how to better harness the power of Pinterest.

Before 2017, most of my readers came from Facebook. But then we kept moving, and moving, and moving. Facebook is a place where you socialize with your actual friends. When you move frequently and take your time getting involved in your new community, you don’t have very many “actual real life friends.”

The more I moved, the less Facebook friends read my posts or even saw my posts. Facebook is a fickle place. That’s okay though. I am writing less and less about our personal lives, and no one ever sees me anyway. I get it.

When I saw the Facebook source drying up, I moved to Pinterest as a primary source. On Pinterest, you connect with people who share your interests. Usually only people who are interested in your topic will come to your site from there. On Facebook, you are limited to people who know you. Some don’t even like you, but they know you. But at Pinterest, what’s not to like? The sky is the limit with Pinterest.

These were a few of my top Pins from Pinterest in 2020:

My fashion-related posts are always a surprisingly big hit, with both Facebook and Pinterest. I really enjoy doing them too.

Other 2020 Blog Stats:

-Highest page views ever (2015 was my 2nd highest year, so this felt like a come back.) Hurray!!!

-Highest number of unique visitors ever (2018 was my 2nd highest number of readers.)

-Published and promoted my first ebook. That was a big deal for me. You can find that here:

-Largest traffic source was Google. 2nd largest was Pinterest.

-Most popular posts with Google were the Quarantine Birthday post and What the Nuzi Tablets from 1450-1350 BC Tell Us About the Bible.

-Most popular search terms: quarantine birthday ideas, nuzi tablets, stories of overcoming evil with good, and christian school vs. public school.

-Most popular posts with Facebook: 60 Triumphant Photos of Spring from Around the World, the Quarantine Birthday post again, 10 Minute Meals, and Where to Next. My Facebook friends prefer my personal posts.

“Where to Next?” was written in January of 2020. That one was fun to look back on because I had no idea what was in store. No one did, really.

-Countries: 76% of my readers are in the U.S.

3 % are in Canada.

3 % are in India.

The blog was also read in the U.K., the Philippines, Australia, Hong Kong, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, Nigeria, New Zealand, and less than a hundred readers in each of many other countries.

Once a distant cousin of Alan’s living in China was reading my blog because I wrote about home schooling, and she saw a picture of Alan’s grandmother. She was like, “Wait!! I know her!! These people are my family!” I thought that was pretty cool.

-I do not subscribe to all the cookies that you see on many sites that give the website more information about their audience. So when I check Google Analytics to see where my readers are, I do not get much information. It literally says “Not specified” for thousands of my readers.

However, it does give me just the city for many, and it is never what I expect.

Top 12 Cities with the most storiesofourboys.com readers, according to Google Analytics:

Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Ashburn, New York, Los Angeles, Orlando, Miami, London, and Sydney.

That used to surprise me because I have never lived in any of those cities, nor do I have many connections to them. But upon further inspection, I realized that those are simply the places where there are the most people. More people present = more people likely to end up on my little random website. Ha!

I only wrote 63 blog posts in 2020.

Back in 2015, my second best year, I wrote 153 blog posts.

The reason I am able to pull in more traffic with half as many articles now is just time and Pinterest. Back in 2015-2017, I did not know to make pins for all of my posts and stay active on Pinterest. That was a huge game changer. You do not have to have perfect beautiful photos of DIY projects to pin on Pinterest. You can pin any topic in the world.

Search engine optimization was another thing it took time for me to discover, and that changed things for me too, but that is a whole other topic for another day.

I was not a quick learner when it came to blogging, but it was never my full time job.

Raising four boys is the gargantuan task to me.

I get overwhelmed trying to do much more than that, honestly. Maybe that is old fashioned, but I do not care. Keeping house with everyone home all the time is a job in itself, don’t you think?

By the time I actually have time to put more effort into my site, I will probably have a whole lot less to write about, eh? But that’s okay. I enjoy doing it, and I hope that I am an encouragement to some of you in the process. That’s the point.

What hobbies have you been pursuing this past year? I’d love to hear about it. Always feel free to comment below!!

The post My Sixth and Most Successful Year of Blogging appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

It was cathartic for me. Besides, it kept all our family and friends better in touch with us since we move so much. In turn, I felt more connected to everyone.

I thought I seriously loved writing. There was a portion of truth to that too. I do enjoy writing, but I don’t think it was just the writing that was making me so happy. It was what I was writing ABOUT. You know how when you have kids that’s all you can think to talk about? Or a new puppy, or even simply a new hobby that’s challenging you? Whatever it is that you pour yourself into, that’s what it is you want to talk about. Desperately.

I NEEDED to talk about being a mom to these boys, and not in a judgey-I have all the answers- kind of way. Don’t you hate that? There is nothing more obnoxious to me than a person who is married to her specific parenting philosophy and thinks everyone else is doing it wrong and she knows how to do it better.

“I potty trained my kids in a day.”

Insert serious eye rolling. Um, no you didn’t. Yes, your child may have peed on the potty on day one and had no accidents on day 2, but honey you just wait. Day 4 everything is going to hit the fan, and the rest of us are going to be secretly happy, since you had to go and brag about it.

Well, you get the idea. I won’t spoil this post with my bitter feelings…

Gradually, my kids got older. Then their friends’ parents ran out and bought their 10-year-olds iPhones, and suddenly it matters what I write about on my blog because my children could face the repercussions of that.

Now it’s one thing to have their friends tease them because of what I wrote about faith or baking a cake, but it’s a totally different thing to be ridiculed about what your mother said about YOU.

Don’t worry. My children have NOT been persecuted about anything I said to this point, but the fact is it could happen. I cannot talk about them on my blog anymore.

And that’s when blogging stopped being fun. I don’t want to blog about my favorite recipes or how many different stores I had to visit before I finally found the perfect dress. I only wanted to talk about my favorite thing: life as a mom, with these people I adore with my whole heart.

It turned out my life as a mom was actually the reason I loved writing. Mostly, I just love being a mom. Thanks to our current sky-high cultural expectations, I’m constantly feeling inferior because I am a house-keeping mom instead of a working mom, and I tried to find ways to use the blog to make money on the side. But the thing is I didn’t love that either.

Literally I only wanted to talk about how cute and funny our children are. Ha! And I can’t do that on the internet anymore, so I’ve blogged less and less frequently. Last year I almost decided to close the blog down altogether. I’ve considered it for this year too, but we shall see. You never know what the future holds.

Probably I will be back occasionally with a funny story or a fashion review, but what I’ve done in the past I cannot do any longer. I miss you all, and we hope you understand.

The post So this is the problem with blogging.. appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

***When you purchase through links on my webpage, I do earn advertising fees.***

12 Days of Jumping Into Fall & Recovering From Summer

Day 3: Shopping, Creating, & Learning Online

(In case you missed the first 2 days, here are the links: Day 1 House Cleaning Playlist and Day 2 Tackling Low Self Esteem.)

Do you know what else you tend to do when you get your days back to yourself? Well, personally, I pop open my laptop and go gallivanting about the world-wide web.

I’ve been shopping for deals, building photo albums, and freshening up my blogging skills. What all do you like to do online? Well, I found some exciting things I wanted to share with y’all.

The funny thing is that I’ve never been that great about buying things online. My husband is actually our Amazon addict. (Don’t even protest, Alan. You know it’s true.)

But I found such AWESOME deals that I indulged, and in the spirit of passing along good news, here are the 4 things I *bought* (okay, one is free) this week online. Some are even from other bloggers, and it makes me EXTRA happy to know I’m supporting a fellow blogger.

This is one of the 30 or so Snapfish photo albums I’ve made over the years. I’m such a fan!

Deal #4 Snapfish Photo Album

Now here’s a secret you may not realize. Snapfish photo albums are ALWAYS on sale. The sale changes regularly, but it’s usually pretty close to 50% off, but you have to go to the Snapfish.com home page and locate the COUPON CODE. Coupon codes are everything on Snapfish.

I love to make these. Actually, I’m sort of obsessed with ordering all our photo products from Snapfish because they cut them specifically for digital photos, so it isn’t like when you drop your photos off at the local drugstore and then get them back with 1/3 of your photo chopped off.

And it’s not just photo albums that are always on sale. Most of their coupon codes are usually “site wide”, so they can be applied to any purchase.

Through September 11th, photo books are up to 72%off. Just use the code 60SEP18!

Deal #3 Boys Jeans from Kohl’s

I got them on sale, and combining it with my $10 Kohl’s cash, they were only $4.95 plus tax. However, that was a “flash sale”, so by the time you read this that one will probably be over.

Kohl’s ALWAYS has deals going on, and I love that their deals also apply to the online store though, so it’s definitely worth checking out. I buy most of my older boys’ pants and nicer clothing from Kohl’s.

Deal #2  FREE Blogging Course with Crystal Paine this Wednesday night!

You know I’m a big fan of Crystal Paine. I’ve talked about that here and here. I know her blogging course will be useful because I’ve already taken a pilot one that she did a couple of years ago as well as the Blog 101 Course

If you are interested in starting or growing a new blog, perhaps even making some money on the side, you can sign up for Crystal’s free blogging class here.

I actually took her course Blog Start Up 101, even though I’m not a beginner, and it was AWESOME. What she brings to the table is 12 years of successful experience as well as excellent motivational skills. Plus, everything in her course is an extremely organized format. Each day had a video, actionable plans, and detailed explanations.

I could’ve saved myself 2 years of “figuring it out” if I had had these courses back in 2014! Click here to check it out for yourself.

Deal #1 Brilliant Life Planner 2019 at the LOWEST Price Ever

Now this is the one I’m the most excited about. That’s why it’s #1.

This was my first year to use this particular planner, and it was a game changer. I’m not even exaggerating. With all the extra notes pages, graph pages, planning pages, and project planner pages, this planner, along with Beth Ann’s free planner school, which comes with your planner, challenged me to plan more thoroughly than I ever have before.

Remember my Facebook Live video about this planner? Yes, I get this excited about it.

Of course, it’s always so funny, me and planners. I start out the beginning of the year like, “Oh yeah!! I’m so excited about this new start. I’m writing down ALL the things!”

Ever so dedicated to writing everything down at the beginning of the year

…and by September my weekly pages look more like this:

not so dedicated to writing allll the things now..

hehehe Look, I’m just not the kind of person who can live up to an hour-by-hour kind of plan. I like a list better. A short list!

However, I will say that I have used almost ALLL the Notes pages in the front and back of this thing at this point in the year, and there were a ton. Not to worry though, because each month has its own Notes pages, and I haven’t touched those. Plus, I’ve managed to save a few blank pages for whatever these last few months of the year throw at us, to include Christmas.

I LOVE these Project Planner pages. I just started this blog daily checklist a week ago. The boys are back in school now, so I have no excuse.

I have 2 solid Project Planner pages left to handle Christmas. Don’t get me wrong though. I haven’t actually started planning Christmas yet.

Oh wait. It’s September. I bet many of you are already all over the Christmas thing…

The Brilliant Life planner is normally $58 and worth every penny and then some, but for only a couple more days it’s down to $42 for pre-order, so I’ve already bought mine! That price is good September 6-13! Click here to learn more or snag one for yourself.

I love filling out these pages!

Are you doing any online shopping? What deals have you found?

If you have any questions about the planner or blogging courses or Snapfish, ask me below, and I’ll find you some answers!

Stay safe in this hurricane! Be sure to check the blog tomorrow (September 11th) evening. We will have a first hand account of that day from my friend Amy who was working on Capitol Hill. I cannot wait to read it!!

The post Day 3 of Jumping Into Fall: Shopping Deals We’re Loving This Week appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

******Disclosure: This post does contain affiliate links. When you purchase through these links, I will be paid advertising fees. All opinions are my own.*******

When I started my blog, in 2008, I was only in it to provide news of our family to my husband while he was in Iraq for 15 months straight. Blogs provide the perfect spot for photos, stories, and videos, without bombarding your Facebook friends with such a vast amount of footage!

It wasn’t until 2013 that I decided to set the blog to public and go for it.  I was already spending about 7 hours/week on my blog, might as well make a little money off of it, right?

The thing about blogging is that it’s one of those jobs that did not exist yet when I was in high school, or even in college. You couldn’t major in blogging.

Once you begin to blog for profit, you need skills, or people who have skills, in the realm of writing, computers, marketing, and design. That’s an elephant-size amount of skills to learn! And I still have a long way to go!

Learning the ins and outs of blogging, without spending much money at all, has led me to a few inspiring bloggers.

The one who I have learned the ABSOLUTE MOST from is Crystal Paine of Money Saving Mom and YourBloggingMentor.com. That’s the perfect name for that website because she is literally my blogging mentor.

Allow me to introduce you to my favorite blogging celebrity: Crystal Paine

My Fan-Girl Confession…

Now, first of all, I have to admit to you that I have never actually met Crystal Paine. I’ve seen about 15 or 30 of her videos (YouTube & Facebook), so I feel like I know her…..the celebrity effect….but in reality she only knows me as yet another obscure little blogger who emails her a lot….

Yes, I admit it. I have emailed her about 20 times over the past few years. Yeah. In fact, I’ve emailed her so much that recently I am getting replies from her people rather than from Crystal herself…

I know. You may be shaking your head at me right now and thinking this sounds awfully stalker-like. I promise I’m not a stalker.  I prefer the term “fan-girl”.

Hello, my name is April, and I am a Crystal Paine fan girl.

I subscribe to two or three of her newsletters, I’ve taken about 4 different online courses that she’s taught, I follow her on ALL of her social medias, AND I’ve read several of her books.

One time, I even got to be on her website. You can see that here: Making Over Your Morning as a Night Owl.

WHY I’m such a Crystal Paine fan girl

You see, in a world where no one teaches you how to be a blogger in school, you have to go hunting down that information for yourself. Crystal has proven to be an excellent resource this past year, as I have attempted to take my blog to the next level.

I love how her blogging products offer practical, actionable advice.

But even before I sought to learn from Crystal as a blogger, I was already an occasional reader of her website, Money Saving Mom. I enjoyed her videos because she pours her personality and work into them.

The biggest reason I am such a fan is that she seems to possess all of the exact skills that I struggle to acquire, and she teaches her strategies in a fun, easily accessible way that I can truly relate to.

Plus, we have so much in common! She’s a writer, a mom of kids similar in age to my own, a Christian, and she strives to live a healthy lifestyle.

My Favorite Crystal Paine Books and Classes

She has so many more than just these. These few are the ones I benefitted the most from because of who I am as a person and where I was in life at the time. I’m also super-stoked to read Say Good-bye to Survival Mode and listen to her FREE WEBINAR about that!

By the way, huge deal alert: Say Good-bye to Survival Mode is only 99 CENTS for Kindle for a limited time!!!

Crystal wrote a book about living a disciplined life! I scooped that up in a heartbeat!! Having a plan and a schedule is this huge struggle for me. It’s something I have to work hard at and learn from people like Crystal.

My default is to wake up, tell everyone to leave me alone while I drink my coffee, get the boys ready for school, then tackle my day with little to no plan at all.

Yes, I know. A failure to plan is a plan to fail…yada yada yada. We are trying, okay. There are four growing boys here. It is a j-o-b!

I cannot explain to you how hard I struggle to keep all the balls I juggle up in the air!!

All the kids….the house cleaning….the cooking…MOPS leadership….volunteering at school…teaching Sunday school…..and oh yeah!! The blog!!!

Can I get an amen here? Are there any of you who are just in this ultra-busy phase of life? Sometimes I just want to shut it all down and say, “Nope. From now on, I enforce rules and cook dinner. That’s it.”

That’s why I love Crystal’s books. She is juggling so many of the same things I am, but she brings time-management and discipline skills to the table that I KNOW I can learn from.

Alan is a fan too!

 
When Alan and I got serious about getting out of debt (car payments) back in 2009, we bought the book, The Money Saving Mom’s Budget. I found it quite helpful, and not only that. It was actually realistic!

But my favorite Crystal Paine moment was this….

Our Family’s Major Life-Changing Routine Inspired by Crystal!!!

Do you remember when Alan took over the laundry at our house? That was because of a YouTube video of Crystal’s that I watched where she talked about the strategic ways she and her husband divide up the work of managing their household.

I know. You want the YouTube link so you can show it to your husband too, but I have no idea which video it was!! I’m so sorry! It might have actually been part of her blogging class a while back that is no longer for sale…

I told Alan about it, in a very light, kind way, and I asked him what thing he’d like to make his responsibility. In a perfect world, we’d have a maid and maybe not have this problem, but in reality we can’t afford one right now.

I said something like, “Hey, honey. You know how sometimes I’m bad about not planning through everything? It occurred to me that I’ve never actually asked you what you would like your chore to be at the house. You do a lot, but nothing is like divided up and assigned to you except trash and the lawn. We need to have very specific jobs assigned to all 6 of us in the family to make this work.”

At first, Alan was very deer-in-the-headlights. He apologized, and we agreed that ALL the jobs can’t be mine alone now that there are four children. It’s not possible.

My husband’s decision

Alan thought about it long and hard, and he chose laundry, which was perfect because my doctor had just told me a few weeks ago that I did not need to be carrying baskets of laundry due to my low back and hip arthritis.

Spending less time on laundry was life-changing for me!! Plus, Alan usually does a better job of keeping up with it than I ever did.

Thank you so much for that, Crystal and Alan!!!

My Work Mentor

I enrolled in a one-time blogging course she did last fall where I learned the importance of doing Facebook Lives, which turned out to be an amazing way to grow my Facebook following.

Then this year Crystal opened up a whole new website for bloggers. If you blog, you have to check it out: YourBloggingMentor.com

When Crystal launched the “5 Days to a Successful Blog Launch” course a couple of months ago, I decided to read it. I didn’t think I needed it since my blog was obviously “launched” a long time ago, but eh, why not?

Oh, y’all!! I could write an ENTIRE POST on all the things I learned from this simple little 5 day course.

Spoiler alert: Some of the 5 days have way more practical ideas than you can implement in only a day. I have this huge list that I made from Day 5’s assignments that is going to take me all of September to get through.

So don’t let this fool you. It is not just for blog babies.

If you need to improve your blog traffic, take this course whether you already have a blog or are just starting one.

Link to Blogging University: Blogging University

Ya’ll!! I can’t tell you how much I have learned!! But this article has run long, so I’m going to save all of that information. Look for a future post in September, dedicated solely to how much I’ve changed my blog since taking this simple, inexpensive 5 Day Blog Launch Course!!

More good news!

I noticed that she is currently running a special FREE webinar for beginning bloggers, and I could not recommend that highly enough. Here’s the link if you’d like to try it out.

Now I’m just holding my breath and waiting for the intermediate course. You know she will probably do one before the year’s over!

So what about you? Are you a member of my Unofficial Crystal Paine Fan Club?? Do you read MoneySavingMom.com?? Which of her books would you like to read? Leave a comment below to let me know I’m not alone in my fan-girl-ness!

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The post Why I’m Such a Crystal Paine Fan Girl appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

Today I’m partnering with Faith of Life of Faith, as her guest co-host to bring you the Mommy Moments Link-up.

This is a space where readers can find new blogs to check out, and bloggers can link up their stories or tips each week and encourage each other.

So allow me to introduce you to one of my favorite weekly link-ups, Mommy Moments!

Welcome to Mommy Moments! It is a blessing to look back on the past several years with all of our co-hosts, guest hosts, and community of moms linking up to encourage and challenge one another. It’s worth so much to know that moms have been blessed and maybe felt a little less alone in doing what God has called them to do. Thank you all for using your writing to be a blessing to me as well as to the hundreds of other mamas who are reading it. I’m thankful for each of you who have made this link up possible!

 The featured post this week belongs to Create With Joy and the “Inspire Me Monday” Link Up! Create With Joy is such a wonderful place to stop by and share your creativity as well as be inspired by that of others! We love supporting fellow bloggers and other link ups, so stop by and link your posts up there in addition to Mommy Moments every week! 

!

 

 

The Life Of Faith

 

Stories Of Our Boys

 

Now, link up your post!

Post can include anything related to mommy-hood, children, homemaking, pregnancy etc. If you aren’t a mom yet, feel free to link up your preparation for motherhood, your journey as you try to conceive, or even a post that would be encouraging to the other moms in the party!

Then, explore some of the other posts in the link-up and say hello to some new blog friends! 

Please, pretty please, we’d love it if you would tweet or share the link up on Facebook so we can all make even more friends! Use the hashtag #mommymoments to help us all stay connected!

Tweet

We would also love it if you could add the Mommy Moments button to your post or blog so everyone knows where you are linking up! If you are not able to copy/paste the code on your page, please e-mail one of us and we would be happy to send you the code!

An InLinkz Link-up

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I just wanted to let you all know that I was so excited to be included in a new list of

“Top Mummy Blogs to Follow in 2017”

Wahoo! Who doesn’t want in on a list like that? Fun! There are a good number of mom bloggers on there who I truly admire.

The best part was looking around at the pictures of the front pages, and wondering why mine looked so…..bare. Granted, you can’t see my sidebar or header in the photo, but I think a re-design is in order yet again. Eventually, I’m going to get this ol’ web page looking like I want it to look!!

Joffa, also known as Joppa. We’ll talk about this town in my next Israel article.

My Army Wives series has been my most popular posts this year. I’m thinking about bumping the Army Life posts up to twice a week. What do you think? Drop me a comment and let me know. It would be a continuation of my story, dating back to 2002, though I’m still hoping someone will let me share their story too.

Click here to read my funny story from Tel Aviv. It involves discounts and me changing clothes in a back alley while hiding from a man with a camera…

Click here to read about our 2002 trip to New York City.

Thanks so much for all of your support!

The post Stories is Included in 10exposed.com’s List of Top Mummy Blogs appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.