Survey Says

You guys.  Thank you so much for taking the time to fill out my silly little survey!  It was awesome to hear from so many of you.  But... hello, TWO HUNDRED AND NINETY EIGHT of you responded.  Where have you guys been?!  It would be so fun to hear from you more often.  A few of you mentioned that you'd never commented before because you feel weird or funny about leaving comments.  You must not know that comments are like crack to bloggers.  So speak up more often... it will make my day :)

Enough about me... who are you?  Well, you're all between 20 and 36 years old except for one of you in your "mid-50s" and one who left a cryptic "older than walkmans, younger than dirt" riddle.  Your ages form a perfect bell curve centered at 29.  I broke out ma fancy math skills and so I can tell you that the average reader here is 28.7, the median age is 28 and the mode is 29.  (Nerd alert.)

You hail from all over the country, and more of you call California home than any other state.  Texas is popular too, but this isn't exactly groundbreaking seeing that those are some big ol' states.  Tied with Texas is my adopted home state of Maryland, including a couple of you who live in the town where I work... is it creepy or cool to think we probably pass each other on the highway regularly?  Also represented: Canada, New Zealand, Australia (I spent six months in your gorgeous country in college!), Mexico, Germany, UK, Singapore, and Costa Rica (jealous).

Only 31% of you have kids, but 16% of you are pregnant, and 27% of you hope to add kids to your families "soon".  That leaves 26% of you without kids or intentions of them in the near future... thanks for sticking around despite the all-baby-all-the-time vibe going on around here lately.

I'm a part of the 28% of you that read blogs on your phone, and I'll admit also to being a part of the 35% that read from work.  A majority of you, 68%, read this blog (and I'm assuming many, many others if you're anything like me) through Google Reader.  Have you guys discovered the "next" feature?  You'll find it under settings, in "goodies", and it's awesome.  An easy way to click through your reader while seeing the actual blog you're reading instead of a feed. 

Almost half of you left me a comment, and they were all so ridiculously sweet I can't even believe it.  You called me lovely, nifty, fabulous, swell, and kind of awesome.  I'd call all of you the same.  Blogging is a freaking self-esteem booster, I'll tell you what.

And now, if I may, I'd like to call some of you out :)

One of you described reading my breastfeeding post while you were in the hospital, and said that it helped you be successful in your goal to breastfeed your second baby even though it didn't work out with your first baby.  That gave me chills.  When I sit here blogging in my sweatpants I don't feel like I'm doing anything productive or important, and I realize that most of the time I really am not, but the thought that I made a difference for you in that way makes me so so happy.

I thought about adding a question to the survey along the lines of "do you know me in in real life and read my blog without me knowing?" but I was worried I'd be too weirded out if there were a lot of you.  But one of you said you were in my sorority three years behind me, and I don't know who you are!  To you I say, "w", and delurk, please :)

I'd like to say "I'm so glad you love it" to the one of you who bought your breast pump based on my recommendation, "exactly, and wasn't it awesome?" to the fellow natural birther who commented about your thoughts on relaxing during labor, and "don't worry, that would make for the most boring blog ever" to the person who asked me to please not start posting an outfit of the day.

I'm glad that so many of you like product suggestion or review-type posts (a lot of you requested more of them), because I really like writing them.  I'll keep abusing my Amazon Prime membership just for you guys.  And for those of you into cloth diapers (there are a lot of you!) I have a diaper sprayer system review post to write soon... get excited ;)  

Thank you to the many of you who left your blog addresses.  Many are new to me and I'll be checking them out.  Fellow bloggers, I highly recommend heading over to polldaddy.com and setting up a little survey for your blog.  Good stuff :)

{Can't post without a picture.... Finn can maneuver his way from crawling to sitting up now, and he's pretty darn proud about it.}