Meet the Bloggers: Blogging with a Buddy – Grown and Flown

Editor’s Note: Last month we posted a conversation between the founders of Science of Parenthood, and we liked it so much that we asked another pair of bloggers, Mary Dell Harrington and Lisa Heffernan of Grown and Flown, to do the same thing. If you’d like to be featured in our Meet the Bloggers monthly series, please contact sharon@midlifeboulevard.com. You don’t need to be part of a team – you can introduce yourselves even if you’re solo acts. Next month, Anne Parris and I will talk about the roads we’ve taken to arrive at our destination as managing partners of Midlife Boulevard.

Mary Dell and Lisa met when their now high school seniors were in the third grade. They bonded over the PTA, raising teens and living as transplants in the Northeast. Every other Tuesday morning the pair would run the school Tuck Shop which largely consisted of ignoring a clamoring crowd of teens, hoping to buy snacks, in order to gossip, complain and commiserate about each stage of parenting. When their oldest sons left for college and the finish line was in sight, they set out to write a blog pondering parenting,

Mary Dell (with full Texas twang): We work on every aspect of the blog together in the hopes that two heads are better than one.

Lisa (with flat Southern California diction): Our backgrounds are surprisingly similar. We are girls from the South and the West who went to big public universities and then came up north to get our MBAs. We are transplants who have made NY our home. We both had business careers in NYC and have both been Working moms, SAHMs and WAHMs.

Mary Dell: We have tried it all and each way of combining work and family has its benefits and its drawbacks. This is one of the issues we have tried to explore on the blog. A great many of our readers are young moms and they are struggling with the work/life balance. We wouldn’t say we have got it right, but we have been there/seen that.

Lisa: Blogging for us is a way to reflect on some of what we have seen as well a thinking about what is ahead. We try and touch on issues relevant to parents with kids ages 15-25, but if you have a 12 year old or a 10 year old this can be interesting to you as well.

Mary Dell: On the other hand, lots of moms want to reminisce with us, so we attract moms who just want to reflect on those years.

Lisa: Blogging has been eye opening for us. It has been pretty wonderful to work on our writing, learn about social media and put our toes in the tech waters.

Mary Dell: But the best part of blogging for us has been our partnership and the women we have met through this process. Meeting other bloggers, online or at conferences has been a real joy, one that we could have never predicted.

Lisa: At home we tend to live in our own world, which is probably a bit unfortunate. Social media opens up the world, friends share interests, not background or experience. Horizons are utterly limitless and it is blogging that has brought this to us.

Mary Dell: One of the most challenging things about being a blogger, if you are not in a clearly defined niche, is finding your audience and your community. For us some of that has come here from Midlife Boulevard and the interest that Sharon and Anne have built.

Visit Lisa and Mary Dell’s blog, Grown and Flown