Welcome to Catholic Sistas’ newest series, featuring some of our friends in the Catholic blogging world entitled Fabulously Featured which will run on Wednesdays. I have always wanted to introduce you to some new blogs to follow and support, but seriously lacked the time to put this together before now. In a Facebook group of fellow Catholic women bloggers, I asked ladies to answer some questions for this series, and they were all too excited to participate! I give you their answers in their own words.
Rita Buetner is the author of Open Window, a Catholic family blog that chronicles her family’s life. They adopted their two sons as toddlers from China. Her sweet spot includes writing about adoption, parenting, and infertility among other topics that are relevant to Catholic families.
ESTABLISHED:
2012
THEME:
Faith, family, adoption, and infertility.
INSPIRATION/MOTIVATION:
When we were waiting to adopt our first son in 2009, I started a personal blog to share updates with family and connect with other adoptive families. In 2011 The Catholic Review—the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Baltimore—invited me to blog on their website. My husband and I discussed it, especially since it meant I had to blog under my full name, and we discussed how to give our sons and family some privacy. But we also saw it as an amazing opportunity for me to write about our Catholic faith and connect with people who might not know much about adoption. Our children and their view of the world are an endless source of inspiration to me, but I am also a member of adoptive, infertility, motherhood, and Catholic online communities, and I often feel compelled to lend a voice to those conversations.
FAVORITE ELEMENT:
My blog is a creative outlet for me. I can share stories about our family and try to connect with others. It has been wonderful to make “friends” who stop by to comment and share their stories, too. Some bloggers worry about reach and numbers. That’s not really me. What I love is building a relationship with readers. The most wonderful thing to come out of my blog was hearing from a reader who said she came back to the Catholic Church because of my blog. Obviously that has little to do with me and everything to do with the Holy Spirit, but it makes me feel I am doing what God wants me to do right now.
FAVORITE POST:
One Sunday I went to Mass without our young children and realized that even though I think they are distracting, they actually help me get even more out of the Mass experience . I also love writing about our experience as an adoptive family, and I wrote this post to answer the question I hear often about our sons, “Are they really brothers?”
BALANCE :
I carve out my blogging time after everyone is asleep. And I try to use my blogging as a way to connect with God and speak to Him in a different way. My advice would be to be looking for ideas everywhere, but only to write at certain times of day so that everything else, especially family time, takes priority. If I’m not focused on being a wife and mother, and if I’m not centered in prayer, I can’t blog.
AUDIENCE:
I write for others who like to talk about faith and family. I also write for people who might want to connect with someone who understands infertility—especially through the Catholic lens—and who are curious about adoption.
CATCH PHRASE/TAGLINE:
The name of the blog, Open Window, comes from a line Julie Andrews says in Sound of Music: “When the Lord closes a door, somewhere He opens a window.” I see our blog as being an open window for the readers to peek into our lives. I also love that it speaks to the opportunities God presents to us that might not seem obvious, but take us to extraordinary places, just as our adoption journey has.
ADVICE :
Consider how you want to write about your faith, and what God is calling you to do. Think about what you want to share personally about you, your marriage, your family. Don’t worry about the number of readers. Just write and enjoy!
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS?
Have a question or comment for our featured blogger? Please leave them in the comments below!
Would you {or someone you know} like to be fabulously featured?
Send an email to Martina@CatholicSistas.comand reference the Fabulously Featured series and we’ll get the ball rolling to get you or your friend featured!