The one in which I GOT PUBLISHED ON THE HUFFINGTON POST!!!!!!!!! (Part 1)

Ok, so...

A while back, I read this blog post about how to submit things for publication on The Huffington Post, and she referred her readers to this podcast, which I listened to. (Side note, I think that's the only podcast I've ever listened to in its entirety. Because I'm behind the times.) Anyway, I read, and I listened, and then I thought to myself, "Self, wouldn't it be cool to be on The Huffington Post???" And myself said yes.

In the podcast, the editor said to look through your posts and submit one that had gotten a lot of attention or shares or positive feedback, so I submitted this one about my tips for recovering from a c-section, because it has more comments than any of my other posts and also has been shared a lot on Pinterest. So I submitted it, and then I waited. And waited. And... crickets. So the post and the podcast said to follow up if you hadn't heard anything, so I waited a week and then followed up, and a very nice editor said they'd get back to me in a few weeks. And then... crickets. (But to be totally fair to HuffPost, which I can totally call it now, because we're BFFs, everything I read said they liked their posts to be under 1,000 words, and the post I submitted was like... 1,800 words. So, you know, clearly I don't follow directions well.)

So then I wrote this piece the other day in a state of massive sleep deprivation called "The Five Stages of Being Woken Up Too Early by Your Kids." And a lot of my friends liked it and shared it and people thought it was funny, and I was like, oh, this one is kind of cute and less than 1,000 words, maybe I'll try this one with HuffPost (hi, best friend!) So I submitted it and then I took a shower, which is not relevant except that when I got out of the shower, I had an email. And the email said, "Welcome! You've been invited to join the HuffPost blogger community."  and I was like, "AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! Wait, what does that even mean?? AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!"

So the email told me to set up my bio, and I did, and then I had to wait for log-in info, and I told Dan, "maybe I just won't tell anyone about this, just in case it's like all the other times I ended up disappointed" (which you can read about in my post, All the Times I Was Never Famous,) and then of course, I posted it on Facebook anyway. So then I got the log-in info, and I needed to submit the post, but the original photo I had used was this one:

and I was like, "Dan, I can't use this picture because it was blurry and taken with the selfie camera on my phone at like 6am so it's too dark and it's awful and The Huffington Post" (we weren't best friends at this point) "will laugh me right off the internet!!"

So it was naptime for our kids (who were both still in their jammies at 1:30pm,) but I begged Dan to just take one picture that was a do-over of the first one but with better lighting. And I made him stand on the bed (no joke) and take a bunch of pictures, and then I looked at them and was like "Why is Lucas eight feet away from me?? This is supposed to look like the other picture!" And Dan said, "You never showed me the picture I was supposed to be imitating," and I was like "THAT'S NO EXCUSE!!"

So then I took the camera and got this picture:

And I was like, fine, whatever, that works, let's put the kids to bed. And then, of course, they both napped for about ten minutes.

I submitted the post and then I waited for a day... Then I started freaking out, because naturally. And I was like, "Dan, I just told everyone I know that I'm going to be on The Huffington Post and now I'm not going to be on The Huffington Post!!!" And Dan was like, you're going to be on it, don't worry, but also we have company coming for Easter and this house is a disaster, except he said it much nicer than that and also while he was scrubbing spit-up out of the carpet, so, you know, it wasn't hurtful.

(I started typing this whole story as one post, but it was going to be a novel. So now it's two posts. Click here to find out if I ever made it on HuffPost. Spoiler alert: I did.)