If it isn't easy, is it worth it?

Today was my first day as a real blogger.  I woke up like an 8 year old on Christmas morning, and ran to the computer to check my "stats."  I quickly shared my scheduled post to facebook (apparently, it no longer automatically feeds), and prepared myself for an abundance of comment love and tons of reads.  I just knew that as soon as I got home from work, I would be on the computer all night responding the the folks that loved my cat so much they had to know more about her.  Truthfully, I'm kidding.  I knew a few people would see it like my husband and my parents (although I'm not really sure if they know about it), but how many people can you really draw in with ONE story-- about a cat getting injured?  Building a readership takes time, and that's only if anyone cares what you're talking about.  While I can't promise to "wow" you, I hope that you'll keep coming back to see more of what I've been blessed to see and get to know the people I love, and what I'm learning life really means.

 With that goal in mind, I came home and set out to learn even more about blogger and how I could make this look better and more professional.  (I do spend a lot of time at work on such things, so I figured it would go as well at home.)  I figured wrong.  First, I saw that I didn't "share" correctly.  Instead of the blog title accompanied by a cute pic on the left, all I got was a long html string of code.  My friend Google?  No help.  I kept toggling back and forth between tabs, trying new things to make it look right, and just got more frustrated.  I realized I hadn't checked how many "reads" I had for the day, so I checked.  Imagine my delight to see that in the last 5 minutes, 16 people using Firefox had read MY blog?!  I knew cats were the ticket to greatness!  I smiled on back over to what I was doing, which was learning to write html code.  In 5 minutes.  I refreshed the page a few more times.  Still messed up.  The stats page was still open, so I refreshed that too.  19 reads!  Wow!  This was unbelieva---  .... wait... I was using Firefox...  Did you know that when you view your own page it inflates your stats like creating imaginary friends boosts your number of facebook friends to astronomical levels?  Well it does.  Bummer for me.  Guess I'll write about the dog next.

Seriously though, I wanted to know all the ins and outs of this whole Blogdom right away, and I wanted it to be easy.  Some of it is, some of it's not.  I still can't figure out how to post/share to fb correctly, and if someone can help me, I'll send you a scarf.  :)  I couldn't get the comments to work, and I don't know what a favicon is.  Not even sure if that's how you spell it.  In my frustration, I suddenly saw a great teaching moment for myself.  Like everything else in life, easy isn't always part of the plan.  Does that make it less worth it?  No way.  It's worth it to me to just know that I have followed through with something, and I'm glad that my girls are already thinking of great stories they want me to tell.

The teacher in me loves to turn everything into an analogy or an example, so I think this captures what I'm trying to say.  I want to grow my seed of a blog into a tree -- our school logo is a tree -- and even if I inadvertently water it with my own editing, I'm happy with that.