I started my blog in September of 2005. When I started it, I only knew one blogger, MEGAN. I began this journey with the intentions of posting about our day to day lives to keep our families in the loop. Jaxon was 4 months old at the time. I also figured it was a great way to document his early years so that I could publish my blog into book form. I never expected to fully reconnect with old friends, have real life friends start blogs too, or especially become friends with perfect strangers!
Quickly I learned that blogging is addicting. Not just the act of posting, but blog stalking as we call it is so much fun. I remember the first comments I left on a few “strangers” blogs. It was so out of my comfort zone, but they responded back and thus “blogland friends” were made! Now, if you notice on my sidebars I have a LOT of blogs that I read (even more on my reader) and I myself have a lot of readers (MANY who NEVER comment by the way – come on leave a comment!!). It’s amazing to me how deeply we can connect to our friends online.

This weekend I stepped over the line and met “blogland” friends that I can now call friends in real life.
So, 6 of us who had never met in person decided a while back that it would be fun to meet up. So we did! And it was amazing. We’re all from different backgrounds, but still have so much in common. Here’s what one of the girls wrote:

While sitting next to a beautiful lady in her late 50’s getting my aching, deprived feet masterfully massaged and lathered so well I proposed to the sweet little girl…sorry, I lost myself. What was I saying? Oh yeah, beautiful lady. After observing the antics, joking and harassing she asked me how long we’d been friends. I looked at my watch and said, “We met for the first time 17 hours ago.” Of course she needed an explanation. But how do you logically explain to someone, “Well, see this is a group of girls who we’ve met on the internet, shared more deeply emotional experiences with than most of our real-life friends and we’ve been planning this first time meeting outta state, away from our families for a long time”? You don’t. You just say, “Oh, we’re on-line writers. We correspond with each other regularly and decided to finally meet in person.” For some reason that sounds better and they say, “Oh, that’s great,” instead of getting this bug-eyed look of “OMG! It’s a gaggle of on-line ax murders!”
I digress. Again.
After a brief description her response was so very heartfelt. “You know honey, I have a group of girlfriends I’ve been friends with for 27 years and we act just like this. The difference is, it took us 27 years to form this kind of friendship. Treasure this. Keep this a priority. Women need these kinds of friends.”

We laughed a LOT, we shopped, ate, got a greatly overpriced pedicure, and slept in very comfy beds. We formed a sisterhood of sorts this weekend. I feel so blessed to have met these women and to have them in my life. Thank you girls for an awesome weekend I will not forget!

Speaking of meeting bloggers….Last weekend I had the pleasure of meeting this Megan in real life. She is such a sweetheart and I really hope we run into each other again sometime, I think we could talk for hours!

My camera was not working, so when I get a chance to steal a picture from one of the girls, I’ll post it!