I was playing around in WordPress tonight and realized how long it’s been since I messed with my website. Looking through my most recent posts, I see that they have been rather sporadic.

In truth, I have been SO busy recently! There are many little things (like Savannah’s 2nd birthday coming up *gasp* next week), but the biggest reason is this:

Isn’t that a pretty logo? I didn’t design it, but I really like it.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned Atlanta Birth Center before, but I am too tired to go back and look. So I apologize for repeating myself. Our wonderful city doesn’t have a birth center, which is sad. Birthing options for women are limited to hospitals and questionably-legal homebirths. Hospitals and OBs have their place, but for a normal low-risk birth, they are a bit overkill and can actually make things worse by introducing interventions that aren’t needed, and not being patient and trusting women’s bodies. A birthing center is a place staffed by midwives that allows women to labor and deliver in a place that is comfortable and encourages a birth as intervention-free as she wants/needs. To me, it’s the best of both worlds – hospital vs. homebirth. I am anxious to see one here in Atlanta.

I’ve never been on the planning team for such a big project before, and it’s quite exciting. I was one of the early volunteers and have thrown my whole heart into it. I offered my skills as a graphic designer, and found myself in charge of the website and the social media. I put my energy into social media first – Facebook, Twitter, etc. (I’ve realized that I tend to do better if I focus on one thing at a time!) We had about 300 fans on our Facebook page when I took it over, and now there are over 800! It’s very exciting. I took a class on Facebook Pages for businesses and I really enjoyed learning more about how to utilize Facebook’s tools and apps to help promote your business. This goes back to marketing, which is a huge aspect of graphic design and something I’m interested in. I “hired” a team of volunteers to help me update the Facebook page, and have had a great time getting to know those ladies better.

In the meantime, I was also on the website design team, and one by one people dropped off and I found myself the lead of that, too. I couldn’t do both, so I handed the Social Media team off to someone else and have been focusing on getting our website designed and maintained.

So what do you think of Atlanta Birth Center’s website? There is, of course, a lot of tweaking that needs to be done but overall I am happy with it. I have put countless hours into it – and my perfectionist nature won’t let me leave it just “okay”. :-) I have really enjoyed it, though it’s a lot of work.

I’m also trying to get our blog off the ground. I have “hired” writers and you should start seeing those posts rolling in. I have been busy coordinating people and posts, proofreading and editing, and managing people. In my free time, I have been reading a lot on blogging and SEO, which is a whole new world for me. I never intended to make a profit from twentysixcats and so while I have been in the blog world for a long time, I haven’t really taken the time to learn all the ins and outs of getting readers to your blog. We’re not trying to monetize the birth center blog, but we do want the content to appear in search engines as a way of spreading the word about our project.

If you’ve talked to me recently, you’ll quickly figure out that I don’t talk about much else other than the birth center. To be honest, I’m putting so much time to it that I just haven’t had time for other things. And you know what? I’m loving it. It’s filling the inner corporate-Ashley, the one who loves meetings and fresh notebooks to take notes, and sitting at desks working hard late into the night. I’m grateful that Savannah plays so well on her own. I moved my computer to the den so she can play and I can be right there to interact with her in between answering emails.

So yeah, I hope that explains my absence some! I am not certain about the future of twentysixcats – I’m sure I’ll come back to posting regularly, but I don’t know when that will be. I don’t anticipate my birth center work letting up anytime soon. :-)

(And if you want to show your support for our project, we’d love for you to “Like” our Facebook page and also help us spread our message and blog content through various social media and blogs! That would mean a lot to me!)