How I became Mrs D plus 3

Last weekend I attended a Blogging Conference on the Gold Coast called ProBlogger Training 2013.  I only decided to go at the very last minute when a friend of mine was unfortunately not able to attend and sold me her ticket.  To be honest, the whole reason that I didn’t buy a ticket to begin with was because Mrs D plus 3 is a very small and mostly personal blog and I didn’t think I was big enough to attend an actual conference.  I also really didn’t know the first thing about blogging, as almost everything I’ve done so far has been self taught (with a little help from Google), so I didn’t really feel like a ‘proper blogger’.  What prompted me to suddenly grab that last minute ticket I do not know, but right now I am so grateful that I did.

With Miss L getting bigger by the minute (sob) I have started to feel a bit panicked about what I’m going to do with my life.  I can’t be a stay at home mum forever – what will I do when the kids are all at school??  My first problem is that I still really want to be around for the kids as much as they need me, and finding a job that will allow me to do just that is not very easy. My second problem is that at this moment in my life I actually have no idea what it is that I want to do. Except write.  I am not a professional writer, but I love to write and I was hoping that Problogger would help me decided if that is enough…….so off I went with a circus of butterflies in my tummy and a mediocre expectation.

Before I tell you JUST HOW MUCH MORE THAN MEDIOCRE it actually was, I thought I might give you a quick glimpse into how I started blogging.

HOW I BECAME MRS D PLUS 3

Ok, I’ll start with the obvious!  My surname is de Beer and after I got married some of my friends stated calling me Mrs Diamonds (which I actually quite like, so if you ever feel like calling me that I won’t be offended at all!)  Anyway the name kind of stuck and was soon abbreviated to Mrs D.  I’ll leave you to guess where the plus 3 came from!!

I’m a qualified beauty therapist specialising in aromatherapy and make-up artistry and I worked for Virgin Atlantic Airways for almost 8 years before signing off to follow Mr D to Australia.  It was a huge move for us (which has without a doubt been the right one) but it was so hard to keep our friends and family up to date on our progress without writing hundreds of repetitive emails.  I started to wrote little updates using facebook notes when someone suggested I write a blog.  I actually had to look up what a blog was in Google as I had no idea!!

So I set one up and called it ‘de Beers Down Under’.  I wrote on it about once or twice a month and I loved it.  I found myself almost thinking in ‘blog’ and every day there would be little event that I would scribble down to add to my next ‘update’.

I carried on like that for almost a year until two wonderful ‘real bloggers’ opened my eyes to the real world of blogging.  The first was the uber cool Che from a blog called Indieberries. She is actually an old friend of my little sister, and one day my sister sent me her link saying “Rob, you must check this blog out, it’s right up your street.  I think you’ll love her.”  And I did!!  Her blog is so much more than awesome and right from the first read, I knew I wanted to write my own.  I didn’t actually have the courage or the know how until I accidentally met the lovely Corrie from Retro Mummy.  She gave the me a brief outline on the do’s and don’t of blogging and told me to just ‘GO FO IT’.  So that was how Mrs D plus 3 was born – on the 5th December 2012.

It has now become like my fourth baby and just thinking about all the stories I want to tell is making me want to get off my chair and do a little happy dance!!

So what I actually learnt at Pro Blogger will be coming up soon…………