The following entry was written by Kathryn of Daring Young Mom.

1. I am a portly guppy, in a small school of fish, in a 20 gallon tank, in the largest pet store in the universe.

So, let’s say I’m the Queen Mother of Ro-Sham-Bo in my Seattle suburb. I head off to the USA Rock Paper Scissors League Championship and am completely slaughtered by the much more experienced and, dare I say, famous competitors. I find myself in total awe of them, only to watch them lose everything at the World Championships. Then I’m even more disillusioned to find that almost no one outside of the RPS subculture has even heard of THEM.

We’re all big. We’re all tiny. We all have a lot to say. We don’t always say everything we intend to and sometimes we say a whole lot more.

2. Size does not matter (unless you’re my publisher and then, yes, stats mean everything. Look how many people will buy my book when it comes out! You want to make ten bucks, right?).

The same way I don’t want my kids growing up knowing the square footage of our pad, I don’t want them knowing how many people read my blog. If by some miracle they’re proud of what I do and not mortally humiliated, I want it to be because they enjoy my writing, not because they think I’m famous with 20 people who live on the internet.

Some of my favorite bloggers have very small readerships but could easily write me under the table if I challenged them to a blog-off.

3. I look better in sexy lingerie.

At the close of the Next Level Naked session, a panel about how much of ourselves we choose to bear on our blogs, Maryam Scoble suggested that naked people are not all that attractive. She prefers a little sexy lingerie, covering up just the right parts and creating some mystery. I loved her analogy and felt that it meshed well with the level of disclosure I am comfortable with on my blog.

Nobody will want to read my blog if I step out into the internet each morning donning a fat parka and ski-pants. On the other hand, you really don’t want to know the status of my bowels, nor do I want to openly berate or embarrass people on my blog.

I want to be as real and open as I can but I also know I have a line. I’m just not sure how sexy I want my lingerie to be. What you may end up finding at my site are flannel pajamas but, by the power of grey skull, they will be attractive flannel pajamas.

4. If I write, I am a writer. End of story

5. Classifications are for Animalia> Chordata> Aves*.

Labels make it way too easy to marginalize or deify an entire group of people without ever looking at individuals. I am not a demographic, a focus group or a market share.

Some of the best moments I had at the conference were conversations with people outside my Technorati tag boundaries. I even found that I had a lot more in common with some of them than I did with many of the mommybloggers I met. If I had been too turned off by their lack of offspring and their constant chatter about their so-called “lives” to strike up a conversation, I would have had a much less enriching experience.

The interesting thing I found at BlogHer was that the same labels were being used by different people with completely opposite connotations. You can’t trust the labels to shield you any more than you can count on them to bring you down so let’s just toss them out with the rest of the useless drama in our lives.

6. The drama? She can kiss my Great Aunt Fanny.

I understand activism, standing up for truth, righteous indignation and all that jazz but more often than not I think “the drama” should hang out at the back of the short bus with her friends “the labels”.

There is so much genuine heartbreak, sadness and turmoil in the world. Why do we feel the need to continuously manufacture drama?

7. I need to get more sleep.

Arianna Huffington, who was oh-so-much more impressive than I expected her to be, said she wanted to start a “movement about sleep.” In her new book On Becoming Fearless she talks a lot about the role of sleep in our lives. She describes the debilitating effects of sleep deprivation and the awful toll it’s taking on our country.

At this point, my kids are sleeping well through the night so I should become as a little child and follow their example. In fact, they sleep even now. Blog out, ya’ll.

*The Birds

Posted by mommybloggers at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Mommybloggers: Kathryn! We just adored hanging out with you at BlogHer. One thing is troubling us, though... you call yourself "Daring Young Mom." We need the story behind the name, missy.

Kathryn: No, I love you more. Seriously, thank you so much for paying my way to the big show. It was fabulous to meet you all.

Daring Young Mom is a play on words from the old song “He floats through the air with the greatest of ease, this daring young man on the flying trapeze.” I love the juxtaposition of images between a graceful acrobat and my staggering attempts at new motherhood. When I googled the phrase “daring young mom” and it came up with zero hits, I knew I had a winner… or possibly it sucked so bad that no one would ever think to plagiarize it.

Mommybloggers: We love your sarcasm and winning sense of humor. Have you always been so funny?

Kathryn: Funny “ha ha” or funny “did you forget to take your medication”?

Mommybloggers: When did you start blogging, and why? Have you always been a writer?

Kathryn: After Magoo was born, I was “advised” to find a hobby to help with some post partum anxiety. I told Dan that I thought I’d try my hand at writing for publication. He “advised” me not to choose a hobby that involved masochistically sending my handiwork to publishers like a lamb to the slaughter. So I chose instead to narcissistically send the intimate details of my life out to the internet like a pig to a pedicure.

I have written for years but did not consider myself a writer until I had an audience larger than my immediate family.

Mommybloggers: We'd love to know about your background. What kind of kid were you? Did you know there was a trapeze in your future?

Kathryn: I was born and raised in Alberta, Canadia with 4 siblings, several dogs who mysteriously died off one by one and 2 taller people who never let us sing while we played cards. I liked to throw myself out of trees in desperate attempts to break one of my limbs so I could get a cast, have it signed, and become the most popular girl in school.

If I had known about the trapeze, my rise to the top (by way of crashing to the bottom) would have been much smoother.

Mommybloggers: You're courageous in your fight against the smell of ghostly poultry. You meet celebrities with reckless abandon. Is there anything you won't talk about on your blog?

Kathryn: Things that will make my children vomit if they read them are not acceptable blog fodder over at Daring Young Mom. For example, I do not blog about the activities that made the miracle of their lives possible or my addiction to the music of the Backstreet Boys.

Mommybloggers: We've got to ask: what is your take on the mommyblogger label? Are you a mommyblogger?

Kathryn: I just don’t like labels in general. We spend way too much time trying to classify each other and not enough time really listening to what others have to say. “That’s a humorous liberal Jewish Chinese woman’s mommyblog,” does nothing but narrow my expectations of what I’ll find when I visit the site. I’d much rather hear, “I read a really engaging blog today by a woman who’s passionate about her family and has a truly unique voice.” I guess the problem is that this world is less about conversations and more about 20 word sound bites.

I do cringe when someone other than my children refers to me as “mommy.” It’s rarely infrequently not unpatronizing. Gosh! I love negatives.

Mommybloggers: We just can't get enough of your writing...where else can we find you? Do you have any new projects in the works?

Kathryn: I’m currently blogging for Parenting.com and the Seattle PI newspaper website. I also have an LDS blog on the backburner and am still working on growing out my mullet. No, I’m not pregnant.

Mommybloggers: Tell us about your interest in documentary films - is there a documentary in your future?

Kathryn: In college I studied English Literature and Media Arts, my final project being a documentary about rape and sexual assault, and I’m really passionate about film. Currently Laylee and Magoo are too wussy to hold a boom mic or carry a tripod and I haven’t made any great film connections in the Northwest but I have a few ideas. If you’d like a job as a cinematographer where you will be paid in crocheted hats and homemade Indian food, please contact me.

Mommybloggers: We love that you host Daring Family Freestyle Rap Battles. In fact, we're thinking that there needs to be a way to incorporate it into BlogHer 2007. Can you give us a sample of your lyrical prowess?

Kathryn:

Get yer tooth-BRUSH from the vanity, OOO let’s fight cavities

You better put away the play-doh, this moment
You own it, you better never let it go
Crusty. You only get one tub, do not miss your chance to show
Grammy your sculpture once before bedtime, yo

You really don’t get the whole experience with just the words on the page. If you could picture me as one of the white moms on Oprah trying to “get down” with one fist raised in the air, attempting some wooden-legged booty-poppin’ as they watched Mary J. Blige perform recently, you’d feel like you were actually there in our living room for a DFFRB. Laylee and Dan like to add some flava with a sweet two-fingered wiggedy-wiggedy faux-vinyl-spinning maneuver which I plan to incorporate into my own routines at some future date.

Mommybloggers: And here are the questions we subject all of our featured bloggers to (With apologies to Bernard Pivot and Inside the Actors Studio):

1. What is your favorite parent related word? Squidge

2. What is your least favorite parent related word? Why? or Ungh-ungh-ungh-ungh-ungh!

3. What is your favorite creative censored curse word used around children? BOOP! We’re so square around our house that we have censored versions of our censored curse words. CRAP! became C-R-A-P! became POOP! became BOOP!

4. What is your favorite hiding place within your home when you need to get away from it all? The solarium – but until we have one of those, the bathroom is my “safe room” of choice.

5. What hiding place have you been found in too often and can no longer use? The imaginary solarium

6. If Oprah exists, what would you like to hear her say when you arrive at the Oprah Winfrey show when she features the Mommybloggers? Just kidding! We’ve been reading all of your blogs and we’ve decided that more than increased traffic, you really need to be the audience for the biggest ever edition of OPRAH’S (that’s me) FAVORITE THINGS!!!

Check back tomorrow as we turn Mommybloggers.com over to the always hilarious Kathryn of Daring Young Mom.

Posted by Jenny Lauck at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

We are delighted to introduce you to our first BlogHer scholarship winner, Kathryn of Daring Young Mom. When we received her entry, with a subject line of Pick Me! Pick Me! we admired her forthright approach. Once we began reading, we found ourselves nodding in recognition:

"Blogging has suddenly made me a writer when 8 months ago I was content to think of myself as a mom who puttered with the idea of maybe writing something someday when the kids were all in school. It gives me power and it gives me a reason to reach daily into my Dr Seuss-ridden brain and try to reconcile my life experiences with the world around me.

Being a mother is overwhelming, isolating, invigorating, satisfying and exhausting. It leaves me questioning everything about myself, my abilities, my choices, and my wardrobe. Seriously, why do I dress like this just because I’ve hatched two small people? Reading the blogs of other women from all walks of life gives me a glimpse into the versions of me that could have been, teaches me what I still can become and confirms to me that I made the right choice to pursue the career path I’m on.

...I didn’t wait to start a blog until I had something sublime and life-shattering to share. My first post was about a little fat boy who had suddenly stopped taking a bottle, putting a serious cramp in my hot-date-at-least-once-a-year lifestyle.

...I am a woman by birth, a mother by choice and a blogger by need and sometimes sheer insanity."

We discovered Kathryn not long after she began writing Daring Young Mom, and we've been fans ever since. Kathryn has a warm writing style, and manages to inject humor into any subject. She draws admiring fans with her affectionate portrayals of life as a wife and mother, and despite her sharp wit and good-natured sarcasm, Daring Young Mom is refreshingly always safe for work.

Kathryn reminds us daily that there is an art to enjoying our families, even on rough days. We just adore her writing, and we're not alone. We asked a few of Kathryn's readers to share what they love about The Daring One:

Jeana loves Kathryn's ability to keep her focus on the positive:

The thing I adore about Kathryn is her inate ability to look at the little commonplace realities of life and see the humor in them. The thing that really sets her apart, though, is her ability to do this even in the midst of sorrow, grieving, trials or poopy diapers that leak all over everything. Lots of people have a sense of humor. Some of them even have a good sense of humor. But not many can hold onto it so firmly as Kathryn can, and that's what I love about her. That, and her floating head. But that goes without saying, doesn't it?

I didn't know how sassy and clever Kathryn was until I met her, and then after about 15 minutes with her I wanted to put her in my pocket and take her home with me. And not just because it was nice to have a fellow sober person to hang out with at BlogHer, but because she is just. that. cool.

You have to adore a woman of faith who is very much a member of the real world; she's not about what SHOULD or SHOULDN'T be. She's a part of what IS, in a smart, hilarious, and yes, quiet yet firmly spiritual way. I admire her tremendously.

Janet was delighted to share how Kathryn inspires her:

I think she is one of the funniest women I have ever 'read'. She's honest and thoughtful and puts it all out there. I think that's what makes a great 'journal writer'. I just found her recently and I can't stop checking in to see what she has to say next. I look forward to her newest posts. I have been quite inspired by some fantastic women bloggers and Kathryn is one of them...It makes me want to make my blog better.

Join us this afternoon as we share our interview with wonderful Kathryn of Daring Young Mom.

Posted by Jenny Lauck at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)