Friday Favourites – An AP Blogger Needs Your Help

My Friday Favourite is a bit of a cheeky one this week. See, I’m asking you to make Diary of a First Child a favourite, even if just for today.

The British parent blogging community is small – much smaller than that in the US – but powerful. I’ve seen some quick and amazing turnarounds from companies when ‘confronted’ by the social media frenzy (think Amazon’s paedophile book, although that wasn’t UK only!) and it’s been pretty incredible being part of that over the last year.

Every year there’s a blog award ceremony for the best of British Mum and Dad Blogs, known as the MAD Blog Awards.

Unfortunately, it’s a voting competition, which I really dislike (because then it becomes more about how many people you pester for votes, rather than the merit of the blog itself – although you could argue that the better the blog, the more readers, therefore the more votes?).

I would like to ask a huge favour from you. Please can you nominate Diary of a First Child?

While it’s terribly cliché to say ‘Awards don’t matter’, the truth is they do. Not to me as a writer, and not to the message I’m trying to share, but they do to sponsors, and they do as far as exposure goes.

The most amazing part of blogging, for me, has been the changes it has made for people. People who now use cloth because I changed their perception on it, people who have continued breastfeeding longer than they ever thought they would, because they learned so much from something I wrote. People who have discovered Baby Led Weaning as an alternative to costly purees. And on and on goes the list.

There are also painfully few UK Attachment Parenting blogs in the UK – there are blogs that focus on home schooling, and a few on breastfeeding, and some bloggers even write about AP topics from time to time, but Diary of a First Child is a rarity in its field. And, to the best of my knowledge, the only one of its kind in the British Mummy (and Daddy) Blogger community.

So – I’m asking that you nominate Diary of a First Child in the Inspirational Blogger category – for my own benefit, yes, but hopefully also that of other new parents, or parents looking for a different way.

To nominate you have to nominate a Blogger of the Year (feel free to nominate me there too, if you don’t have any other UK blogs in mind) and then you can nominate as many or few from the 14 other categories too – but don’t nominate me in every category, or your entry will be void! (I’m not a pregnant, baby or new blog, for example!)

Of course, if I’m short-listed there’ll be a vote in a few weeks time, but I’ll let you know about it then – in the meantime, every nomination counts as only the top five are short-listed.

And that’s the end of my grovelling. Friday Favourites will return next week as usual 🙂