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Home › Articles › Moms and Dads › Blogging the Baby

Blogging the Baby

Keeping an Online Journal during Pregnancy and Beyond

By Kelly Burgess

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Blanchard, 39, started her journal, And Baby Makes Seven (http://blogs.salon.com/0002504/2003/05/08.html), before she became pregnant. She called it "one family's attempt to have it all," and the intent was to chronicle the new life of a couple who found love a little later in life than perhaps is average. In addition to information about her pregnancy, there are sections on her dogs, her garden and on remodeling her house.

A psychology professor, Blanchard has to do a lot of research-based writing for her job and enjoys the freedom of blogging. "I like to write and this is so much more fun than the other forms of writing I do," says Blanchard. "When I started this blog, I knew we wanted to get pregnant within a year, and since we're an older couple I thought it would be interesting to chronicle our attempts and perhaps to help others who are going through the process. Part of my motivation was that there is so much scary information about older mothers out there and much of it misleading statistics, I wanted to debunk some of that with my own reality."

Like McCall, Blanchard also uses her online journal as a way to keep relatives and friends from around the country informed about what's going on in their lives. The Blanchards have lived in a variety of cities, and this makes it much easier to keep in touch.

Invisible Support
But there's more to blogging than just letting Grandma see pictures of the latest ultrasound. Gayle Peterson is a family therapist specializing in prenatal and family development, and she says that blogging may be a way of helping the expectant mother cope with anxiety.

Blogging the Baby-Keeping an Online Journal during Pregnancy and Beyond"Pregnancy is a huge transformation, especially for a woman becoming a mother for the first time," says Peterson. "Women have more anxiety in pregnancy because they're taking on new tasks, and the best way to handle that is by expressing it. Expressing it to yourself is good, but expressing it to other people and having them say 'I know what you mean' is a very legitimate way of coping with the anxiety of this change."


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