EVERYTHING

FOR YOUR FAMILY

• Babies/Maternity
• Camps
• Education
• Enrichment/Sports
• Family Services
• Healthcare
• Just For Moms
• Party Planning
• Places to Go
• Retail
• CFCOC Resources

mom bloggers, continued ...Published: February, 2010

“I don’t do any product placement. I just decided it wasn’t really something I wanted to do,” says Broughton, who was picked up by the Orange County Register just two months after she started her blog, Alive in Wonderland, and now has a relationship with OC Family as its lead blogger. 
   
The Irvine mother of two, who came from a background in journalism and television, says that as soon as she saw a friend’s blog, she was hooked.
   
“Mom blogging is the new Prozac. It gives us an outlet,” Broughton says. “At night, if you’re really quiet, you can hear the clicking of thousands of keyboards of mommies typing after their kids go to sleep.”
   
Broughton says she gets a good response from readers when she posts about the kinds of only-in-Orange-County moments she stumbles across, like the time she overheard a young woman at Costco tell her boyfriend that she didn’t know maple syrup came from trees.
   
Broughton decided early on not to post too many intimate details of her life, or to share family photos, though she does use her children’s names. Still, she says she does get a lot of response when she posts personal stories of her own, like her ineptness in the kitchen, or having to get glasses for the first time in her life, at age 42.
   
For blogger Tina Cruz, however, the personal is exactly what drew her to the blogo-sphere. Cruz is a mother of three children, two with high-functioning autism and one with Asperger’s Syndrome. She began blogging about what it is like to watch her children grow up with autism as “a journal kind of thing, a way to get my thoughts out.”
   
Cruz writes a personal blog called Send Chocolate Now and an OC Family blog called Trampled by Zebras, and also founded a community blog called Autism Sucks. Blogging complements her other role, covering issues surrounding special-needs kids for the citizen journalism site Examiner.com.