In 2013, Building Better Blogs celebrated Recess at Work Day by asking a group of bloggers a wonderfully unserious question: what do you do for fun when you are supposed to be blogging?
The resulting post was tiny - just a few sentences and a list of participating blogs - but looking at that list more than a decade later makes it considerably more interesting. Some of those blogs disappeared. Some remain online as snapshots of an earlier blogging era. And some of the bloggers built businesses and websites that are still going strong.
So instead of throwing away this little community post because the original occasion has passed, we went back to see what happened to some of the bloggers who took "recess" with us.
Where Are Some of These Bloggers Now?
Frugal Mom Eh! - Elizabeth Lampman
Frugal Mom Eh! is still active. Elizabeth Lampman says she started the site in July 2012 after a career in IT and developed it into a professional Canadian food and recipe blog. Today the site focuses heavily on family-friendly recipes, cooking and baking.
Her work has traveled considerably farther than that little 2013 Blogathon-era mention might have suggested. Elizabeth's site lists features in outlets including Today, Delish, USA Today, Good Housekeeping, HuffPost, Country Living and BuzzFeed. She also continues to work with brands on sponsored content, recipe development and other collaborations.
That is a good example of something we are seeing repeatedly as we revisit the Building Better Blogs archives: a casual blogging-community connection from years ago may now point to a creator who built a long-running publishing business.
Journeys of The Zoo - Sarah and Family
Journeys of The Zoo is also still online. The site describes the adventures of Sarah, Ed, their children and their pets, with the family dividing time between Ontario, Canada and Mexico.
The site's current About page still reflects the relationship-driven blogging model that was so visible in the original Blogathon community: family stories, travel, product reviews, sponsored posts, blogger outreach and social-media campaigns all live under one roof.
Seeing it today is a reminder that not every successful longtime blogger had to turn a personal site into a narrowly defined publishing brand. Some continued evolving around the lives and interests of the people behind them.
Merry About Town - Merry Kuchle
Merry About Town is another survivor from the list. Merry explains that she originally began blogging after moving to Calgary from the United States so family could keep up with her new life. Her family apparently did not become the audience she expected-but other people did.
Over the years, the site developed into a substantial collection of recipes, family life, travel and other lifestyle content. Merry also folded content from another site, Best Birthdays, into Merry About Town rather than maintaining everything as separate properties.
That evolution is particularly relevant for today's bloggers. Long-term blogging does not always mean starting more sites. Sometimes sustainability means consolidating useful content into the property you actually want to maintain.
Tales of Mommyhood - Ashley Picco
Tales of Mommyhood is still online too. Ashley Picco started blogging in August 2008 when her oldest son was a little over a year old, initially as a way to record his life and share it with family who lived farther away.
Years later, Ashley is still writing. Her About page now jokes that the boys in an old photograph are 15 and 18, a wonderful little marker of just how much life can pass while a blog remains online. The site has continued to include family life, cooking, baking, gardening, reviews and partnerships.
A 2016 interview with Ashley also captured something that fits the history of Building Better Blogs especially well: when asked about her favorite part of blogging, she pointed to the people she had met and the support system she found through blogging.
The Bewitchin' Kitchen - and Randa's Next Chapter
The Bewitchin' Kitchen has an especially interesting story.
Randa started the site in 2009. It grew into a substantial food and wellness property, and her work was featured by outlets including BuzzFeed, Redbook and Country Home magazine. But the story did not end with simply keeping the same blog forever.
Randa says she sold The Bewitchin' Kitchen in 2020. She continued working in food, nutrition and online publishing and is now associated with Busy Day Dinners, where her background is described as blogging, nutrition, speaking and brand collaboration.
The Bewitchin' Kitchen itself also remains active under its later ownership, publishing recipes years after its founder moved on.
That is a particularly useful blogging-business lesson. A website can become an asset with value beyond the founder's personal involvement. Building something sustainable can eventually mean continuing it, changing it, consolidating it-or even selling it.
What Happened to the Rest?
The original list also included Whispered Inspirations, Home of OHM, Not Quite a Handful, Born 2 Be Mom, Multitesting Mommy, Raising My Boys and Mommy Knowz.
Some names still appear in old Blogger profiles, archived references and the network of blogs people followed at the time, but we could not confidently establish a current career or active site for every person from reliable public information. Rather than guess that two people with similar names are the same blogger - or declare a blog dead simply because an old URL stopped working - we are leaving those names exactly as they appeared in the original post.
If one of those bloggers finds this retrospective and wants to tell us where life or blogging took them, that would be a wonderful addition to the story.
What This Little Post Says About the Blogging Community
The original Recess at Work Day article was never intended to document blogging history. That is precisely why it does.
It captures a group of bloggers casually participating in a shared idea. There was no grand prediction about which sites would still exist years later, which blogger would sell a successful property, whose children would grow up while the archives stayed online, or whose site would evolve into a professional recipe business.
They were simply bloggers talking to other bloggers.
Those relationships are part of what Building Better Blogs and the Biannual Blogathon Bash were built around. Blogging was never only about search rankings, pageviews or publishing schedules. It was also about people swapping ideas, joining challenges, commenting on each other's work and sometimes growing alongside one another for years.
And Yes, Bloggers Still Need Recess
There is also one part of the original post that does not need modernization: people who work online need permission to stop working sometimes.
When your workplace is your laptop or phone, it is remarkably easy for work to follow you everywhere. A break does not have to be earned by completing every possible task first.
Go outside. Read something that is not research. Garden. Bake. Play with the dog. Call somebody. Make something that will never become content. Spend time with people without photographing it for social media.
A sustainable online business should leave room for a life outside the business.
That is one of the principles behind the Building Better Blogs we are rebuilding today: build a blog that supports your life - not a life consumed by your blog.
From the Building Better Blogs Archive: The Original Recess at Work Day Post
The following short post is preserved from the original Building Better Blogs archive. The blogger names are retained as they appeared at the time.
Today is Recess at Work Day and for bloggers, most of whom work at home, it can be easy to take a recess instead of doing the work we are supposed to be doing.
So I asked a bunch of bloggers, what fun things do they do when they are supposed to be blogging? Today is the day you are ALLOWED to do those things!
So slack off today, put aside whatever you were going to do because it's Recess at Work Day!
Woohoo!
Thanks to these bloggers for weighing in:
- Frugal Mom Eh
- Journeys of The Zoo
- Whispered Inspirations
- Home of OHM
- Merry About Town
- Tales of Mommyhood
- Not Quite a Handful
- Born 2 Be Mom
- Multitesting Mommy
- Raising my Boys
- The Bewitchin Kitchen
- Mommy Knowz
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