My blog reading list has changed of late. I’m currently fascinated by craft blogs and by parenting blogs – isn’t it nice how there’s a blog (or a dozen) for every phase in your life, every interest you acquire?

My daily blog reading time has been heavily curtailed by the amount of time taken up by our new baby, but here are a couple of my current favourite reads:

• SouleMama – this mother of three blogs about sewing, embroidery and other craft projects she does alone and with her kids, and post photos and descriptions of family moments that allow me to dream of my ideal visions of family: you know, the ones where we’re all constantly happy, beautiful and creative and I’m the perfect mother always. And have a great career too of course, but that’s sort of a bit vague in the background in these dreams. SouleMama also recently published a book, Creative Families, which I enjoyed – although it sometimes makes me frustrated that Jessica’s too young to do this stuff with (only one month old after all) and my big girl’s big enough that she’s mostly got her own projects… Ah well, it’s sort of like reading cookbooks, I suspect, more about the dreaming than about necessarily actually doing it all.
• Karen Cheng is a Perth-based designer who also writes about life as a mother, and has a beautiful looking blog to boot. Karen is more likely to post a tutorial on how busy people take great photos rather than explaining how to embroider French knots, or she’ll post a quick recipe or explain how she organised a social event for the other mums at her son’s preschool rather than how to make binding for edging fabrics, but the fragments of joyful life with children are there, and just what I want these days.
• Clancy “CultureCat” Ratliff is a colleague whose baby was born just a week after ours, so of course I’m following her blog these days – and she actually blogs about her baby, unlike me (Jessica is however heavily documented on Scott’s (and to some extent on my) Flickr stream, though mostly for friends and family only I’m afraid). Clearly Clancy’s life is also baby-focused rather than work-focused right now, though I think she has to go back to work much sooner than I do.

Jessica’s waking up, so I’m going to leave it at that. And generally that’s where I have to leave it while blog surfing, too…