New Month, New Plan and an Editorial Calendar!

February has arrived and with it comes many things: Valentine's Day, heart awareness month and my daughter's birthday!  For those of you who might be unfamiliar with my daughter's story, it is recorded over at my other blog A Second Heart.  I don't blog much there any more unless she has some health issues, but the back story is there.  In short, she had severe heart issues as a baby and had to have a heart transplant at 4 1/2 months old.  So, she is part of the 1 in 100 who have heart defects or problems and February is our month to raise awareness.  I will be posting more on that in the coming weeks.

In addition to that during the month of February, she also celebrates her birthday.  Which is a big deal when you've seen death come extremely close in the past.  This is the first year that she has been both well and old enough to understand a birthday, so we're throwing her a party.  We are inviting her preschool friends and some former playgroup members to come and we're having it at the Pre-preschool down the street.  So, we will have an art project, lots of fun indoor playthings to do like dress up and playdough and a slide and tons of toys.  It is perfect for a preschool party in a month that the weather can be a little too unpredictable for a park party.  I am horrible at planning and implementing parties though and February is one of my busiest work months.  So, I'm really going to try to keep it simple and not put a lot of pressure on myself.  Perfection is not necessary - they are three and four years old for goodness sake!

I am also implementing a new blog plan this month with an official editorial calendar!  I feel like my blogging is haphazard to say the least.  So, I'm going to see if having an editorial calendar will help.  I took the cue from Scraps of My Geek Life (don't you just love that name?) who had a fantastic editorial calendar for excel that you can download and fill in with all your blogging ideas!  Which I have started to do.  So, tomorrow, I start with my first editorial calendar post and I'm hoping that it will continue at least most days (versus being so hit and miss)!  I'm excited to have a plan to implement versus just some random idea of wanting to say something every once in a while.

Finally, this month is Valentine's Day.  I must say that I find myself to be a little less than pleasant as a wife lately.  So, since it is the month of hearts and love, I figured I would try to be a little more of a loving wife this month.  I will share some ideas I'm trying and some blogs I'm finding that I hope will be helpful in that pursuit.

My focus this month is Heart and Soul.  Heart because of Valentine's Day and heart awareness and Soul because I need to do some soul-searching to find myself and my place in this world.  I am feeling incapable of being the Girl who Can Rant because I'm unsure what I should be ranting about - good or bad.  And that, for me, is a little scary.  I just feel a little lost from my usual place of being.  So, I will be doing a little bit of work on that as well this month.  And hopefully, but the time March rolls around, I will have a better marriage, some things I can rant about from a place of security, and a healthy daughter who stands as a testament to the lifesaving gifts of modern medicine.  And I hope that you will know more about all of these things from reading the blog!

See you tomorrow!