My Experience: Laura ‘Are We Nearly There Yet Mummy’

Laura 'Are We Nearly There Yet Mummy'

Three years ago I didn’t know what a blog was. My daughter was three and my son was two. As well as the daily ups and downs of motherhood I was under severe emotional pressure due to a family trauma. To stop me losing my marbles completely I recognised that I needed a release.

I accidentally discovered blogging. I read Judith O’Reilly’s book ‘Wife in the North’, based on her blog and her very honest account of moving her family to Northumberland. Late one night I typed the word ‘blog’ into Google. I’ve never looked back. I had always loved to write but had never found the right medium. Blogging gave me an outlet, a release and instant gratification.

I thought the name ‘Are We Nearly There Yet, Mummy?’ summed my life up perfectly. The blog was so cathartic. It didn’t matter what was going on in my personal life, sitting and writing amusing family anecdotes was the perfect escape. My Dad was living in Spain at the time and a fortnightly phone conversation whilst changing a nappy and wrestling a permanent marker off a toddler really wasn’t enough. The blog gave him a window into our lives.

I have two blogs, the main one, ‘Are We Nearly There Yet, Mummy?’ and ‘A Mum Shaped Hole’ which is the serious side of me that people don’t see very often.

A Mum Shaped Hole is all about losing my Mum to cancer when I was 9. I’d struggled for years with her death. As I became a teenager, a wife, a mother my grief was ever present, it just changed with each milestone. When I realised how cathartic the other blog was I started writing about Mum. In April 2010, I appeared in Company magazine in an article entitled ‘Blogging became our therapy’ and from there people started emailing me. Up until that point I hadn’t known anyone, personally, who had lost their mother as a child. Now I had people contacting me and telling me about their experiences. I no longer felt alone.

My biggest problem is finding time to keep up to my blog. These days it’s not just blog posts; I have to maintain the site, write reviews and deal with daily PR approaches. I also work closely with brands such as Disney, Morphy Richards, Duplo, Yeo Valley, Seaworld, Toys R Us and Playmobil. The perks have been plentiful but I put that down to being in the right place at the right time. I started blogging the year before ‘Mummy Blogging’ exploded in the UK. It’s time consuming, but I love it, and I’m forever trying to find new ways to blog without it encroaching too much on everyday life … which is easier said than done. The Husband recently said “Blogging no longer consumes 100% of your waking hours; you’ve worked incredibly hard to reduce it to 90%!”

My Husband is my biggest critic and I can’t thank him enough for that. He has always been honest about my writing and if something is rubbish he’ll tell me so. Likewise when I write something great he’ll shout from the rooftops. I have a lot of self-doubt, but he made me realise that I could take my writing up a level and finally start writing a children’s book which has been swimming around my head. I now have a new challenge ahead of me; writing a book, blogging and maintaining our family life!

Blogging has made my life richer in so many ways. It’s inspired me to start writing a children’s book, I’ve made very special friendships, gone round the world on review trips, ached from laughing, cried a few tears, it’s been a very cheap form of therapy and given me a great sense of achievement. Most importantly, my children have a record of their early lives, something in the absence of my Mother I do not have, which makes it all the more worthwhile.