Thanks for an awesome few days!

Thanks for an awesome few days!

I awoke yesterday morning to my usual routine: Alarm goes off and I immediately fumble around on the floor for the iPad to see if anyone’s looked at my post from the evening prior. That pre-coffee, blurry-eyed blog check generally reports a satisfying 10 or 20 views and I’m ready to get started on my day.

Yesterday was a bit different. The process was the same as usual, but the results were quite unexpected: I had 400 views! I squinted at the clock through a thick layer of overnight eye boogers: 7:45 AM.

You know those movies where there’s a guy at the street corner with a bottle in his hand and something totally wierd goes by? Like a dog riding a bicycle being chased by an alien in a tutu? The guy shakes his head, rubs his eyes with his fists, looks again, then looks at his bottle and tosses it out. Well I was that guy, only without the street corner, the dog, the bicycle, the alien in the tutu, or the bottle.

Right, not such a good analogy after all. But I did rub my eyes, so there’s that.

After rubbing my eyes, I refreshed my page: 427 views.

Again: 463 views.

By the time I had cleared the barnacles from my eyes, sat up in bed and looked at it again, I was pushing 500 views.

Clearly I was reading something incorrectly, so I checked the comments: 34, all new faces.

“Um, Honey…um, something’s happening…,” I said in that tone that I had up till then reserved for winning the lottery.

Well, it turns out something really was happening. Someone with a sufficiently whacked sense of humor had chosen my blog to be listed on the WordPress.com Freshly Pressed section of their home page. And it turns out that a lot of people take their advice on blogs to go check out.

OK, so I didn’t win the lottery but honestly it really is the next best thing. There is nothing that an insecure, relatively new-to-the-scene blogger wants more than eyeballs. Not in the marauding zombie blogger sense, you know like, “Eyeballs, I must have more eyeballs…mmm eyeballs…” (although no doubt the genre exists) but the kind of eyeballs still securely tucked into the face and accompanying a fully functioning brain.  And I was getting them fast and furious.

Well, fast; I hadn’t read enough of the comments to tell if they were furious.

It’s now been fewer than 48 hours and I’ve passed 12,000 views! I should point out that that is a full 6 times the TOTAL number of all views during the 2 months that I’ve been online prior to this. In two days. I have no idea what other bloggers get, but that’s pretty awesome for me.

So I have two things to say:

Thank you to the folks at WordPress.com for deciding I’ve Become My Parents warrants listing on Freshly Pressed. Honestly, I am thrilled, honored and quite frankly blown away.
And thank you to my 12,000 new best friends for showing up to check out the blog. I do hope you like it. It’ll take a little while to learn all your names.

I will always try to respond to each comment with a “thank you” at the very least. It’s not really a blog if it’s not a two-way conversation (at least not the kind I want, anyway). That may take some time if there are a lot, but I will do my very best.

I am well aware that a lot of visits generated by a single listing means only that you were convinced to visit once. My hope, of course, is that you’ll like what you find and choose to come back. Either way, I’m really glad you stopped by!

Now go on…read something!