The MADs Awards – one week left to vote.

Honestly, I know I’m getting boring about this – in one week the voting process will be over. I’m up against massive competition, I know, and I really don’t expect to win, but I’d love to have given it my best shot and so I’m just going to ask these few last times if you’d be kind enough to take two minutes to vote for me in the MADs Blog Awards.

I’m up for Best Family Life Blog – I guess this is the perfect one for PoP to be in. The blog has been running for 9 years; in that time we’ve had our last two babies on the blog, watched a child die, spent pretty much every last moment we have with our kids, educating them at home and living life. it is pretty stuffed with ideas for projects, activities and things to do, from reading book lists to favourite poems. Our ArtEtc days, which we do with our friends Le Ciel Rouge’s, get masses of hits 🙂

We’ve been through times when our marriage staying solid looked unlikely, the toughest times of all in many ways. We’ve set up our own business and I’ve been a very overworked WAHM and then we took the leap of voluntary redundancy and Max came home to run it instead of me. I’ve blogged our holidays, our Christmases, the down times when there wasn’t enough for anything at all. I’ve blogged about depression and the traumas of unexpected pregnancies. I’ve talked, endlessly, about the grief of losing Freddie and how it has changed the family. We’ve gone from having pre-schoolers to a teenager, from a fraught and tricky life to a laid back and pleasant one, albeit laced with tragedy. This is truly a blog that has almost every facet of family life laid bare through it, from silly Fimo models, trying to find routines that work and how to get on top of the clutter without going mad to the birth stories that get the greatest numbers of hits of all.

So, while I’m up against huge competition, I’d love to win, because this blog has my heart and soul in it. To lose it would be like losing my memory. I keep it, solely and for no other purpose, because I hope one day I can look back and relive the past and because I hope the girls will read it and see everything we wanted and tried to achieve for them.

It’s more difficult to sell myself when it comes to the Most Inspiring category. I don’t feel inspiring at all at the moment. I hope, I truly hope, it is partly because PoP has helped make Home Educating seem accessible and possible for people at their wits end. I hope that in the year since we lost Freddie that some people have come here and seen my heart pinned out on the page, each millimetre of movement and changed catalogued and have drawn some comfort from it that they too wil make it to 6 months past and a year past. It is the blogs I have read that have kept me going, without doubt. I hope I’ve done the same. I hope some of the people who come here looking for how to plan a baby funeral or how to plan a memorial for a baby have found what they needed.

I hope I’ve given someone the courage to try for a VBAC, or stand up for themselves in hospital. I hope when I blogged about the Labour party attack on Home Educators, I helped with the mobilisation of forces that eventually had that thrown out. I hope that I’ve given people hope that even in grief, there is some healing.

I hope I’ve inspired some people to be creative, to try knitting or grab some Fimo or maybe some day, even have a go at running. I’d love to think that the long term readers have watched me build the craft and toy business from 3 plastic crates of beads to 3000sq ft of unit and are pleased for us and proud of us and inspired to try self employment themselves. Goodness, we’re a Ltd Company now. If that isn’t big and scary, what is? 😆

Maybe I’ve inspired someone to blog or write, or try something different for their children when convention isn’t working. Maybe I’ve been passionate enough to stop someone making the mistake of their life like I did, to trust their instincts or to forge ahead with a plan that is daring but terrifying.

I hope that in among all the waffle, the gardening and tears, the books I’m reading to distract myself, the targets I set and the apparently endless changes of tack when it comes to how the girls learn something, you see us for who we are and feel welcome here. I owe a lot to my blog, from it I have made many friends.

I feel rather out of place in that category, but I’m proud to be there – and I’d be so grateful for your vote.

There is one week left. If you would tweet, Facebook or share this link and help me garner some support in the face of such stiff competition, I’d be so grateful. I can honestly say I am not motivated by the prize at all, I’d just love to win, for me, for Freddie, for the girls and for Max, without whom I think I would long ago have folded up into nothing. This blog holds everything I hold dear, including that little space.

Thank you.