Recommendations, Please!

If you're not interested in my blah, blah, blogging journey skip to below the stars if you want to know how you can help me out.

There was a time, years ago, when I was obsessed with blogging. Nothing terrible, just the way most of us felt early on when we were making lots of new friends and really coming to love this community and the ability to toss out things we are thinking about, however important, trivial, silly or serious, and the surprise of realizing that we aren't the only one, or at least if we are, people like us anyway.

It was pretty early on that I realized that it was getting to be too much. I was on the computer too long. The little follower widget was a source of happiness but I realized that I kept looking at everyone's number. I hated that. "Oh! She's got a lot of new followers since I last checked!!" and "What is the deal!?! Why isn't she getting more followers!?!" I felt it was against my own philosophy (blog for fun and don't worry about number of comments or followers). So, to keep from feeling like it was a competition, I removed the widget.

Soon after that I realized that I could not keep up with everyone who visited or followed my blog. I seriously hated knowing that I was missing out on potentially awesome friendships but I hated even more knowing that I was missing out on my children's potentially awesome childhoods.

Awhile later I had the pregnancy from Hades and had no desire to communicate with anyone, though I did try to peek in on others now and again. The baby came and suddenly family was all I ever thought (and sometimes blogged) about.

As things normalized I started getting back into reading blogs and posting occasionally. I realized that many of my friends had also stopped posting regularly (or at all!) while I'd been pre(self)occupied. Sad! But then I definitely understand.

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Here we are today. I feel fairly disciplined in my blogging habits since getting back into it and I am realizing that with the changes in my friends' blogging frequency I can definitely afford to add a few more blogs to my reader. Now my problem is that I don't know which ones to add. I definitely don't want to spend hours blog-hopping to find people that "fit" me, so I thought I might ask YOU.

I really value having blogging friends that I feel are either like me, or like the person I'd like to be in some way or another. I guess that is sort of the definition of "friend". Duh.

Anyway, so who do you think I might like (or love) to read? I don't read any of the hugely popular blogs but I would if you told me I had to, but mostly I'm wondering about the people in your comment trails that I have seen around all this time but never got around to checking out their blogs.

Could you let me know (by either comment or email) who are maybe a few of your favorite bloggers? I would really appreciate it! It will narrow down the time I spend searching out new people and give me more time to make my children's childhoods awesome. Ha!

(I am looking forward to Stephanie's Find-a-friend Fridays! I'm already emailing the first one from friday, Jocelyn, about some family history info she needs from Poland! Hooray for new friends!)