NaComLeavMo: What?! and Welcome!

NaComLeavMo: More Conversation Than You Can Shake a Stick at

What exactly is NaComLeavMo you may (rightly!) ask? Well, I first heard about it while visiting www.blogher.com, although now I can't find the original post about it. Then I visited the hostess's blog, Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters. (Weird name, yes, but it makes sense when you realize it's an infertility blog~ LOL)

NaComLeaveMo is short for National Comment Leaving Month. The idea behind this is to get more interaction between bloggers, especially those from different parts of the blogosphere. It started with the Infertility Bloggers last year but is open to EVERYONE with ANY kind of blog now.

You can read all the "rules" here, but basically here's what you need to know:

mark somewhere on your calendar that you are going to leave 5 comments a day and return one comment a day between May 25 and June 25. In other words, you will do your normal blog reading, but you will make sure that you leave at least 5 comments a day and regardless of how many comments you usually receive, you will return at least 1 comment by going to a commentor's blog and leaving a comment there. If you do not have any comments that day (perhaps you didn't write a new post or your blog falls into a strange, other-worldly commentless abyss), simply jump to the participant's list and pick a new blog and leave a comment.

Pretty simple. But brilliant, really. There are so many people out there with fascinating blogs yet most of us only stay within our comfortable little blogging groups. This is the perfect excuse to break out of your comfort zone and find new blogs to explore!

If you'd like to participate, sign up here, then get started commenting! As of today, there are 167 bloggers registered. I realize that most are from Infertility Blogs (scroll to the bottom for more on that*) but the goal is to branch out to include lots of other types of blogs so please get involved!

For those of you who are visiting me because of NaComLeavMo - thank you! Welcome! I encourage you to check out some of the blogs listed in my sidebar. Also, please visit The Hidden Side of a Leaf and check out the Weekly Geeks posts. Dewey has a great group of bloggers participating in this weekly challenge. Previous activities included blogging about your favorite childhood books, and posting about a social issue you are interested in. You can quickly visit lots of fantastic blogs, and I know everyone would love more comments!

Happy Commenting to all!

*On a personal note, I'm having a hard time visiting the Infertility blogs. Although I do have one child, I've tried for years to have another without success. We did 8 rounds of Clomid, three artificial inseminations, two rounds of in-vitro, and an exploratory surgery. Finally we resigned ourselves to having just one child and let go of the hope for more. In general, I'm ok with that decision ... but reading about it all over again is really hard for me. SO ... I'll do my best to visit those blogs but I can't say how well I'll do over the course of the month.