Following is a blog post by Terra Hangen, a member of The Word Quilters, the women behind both A Scrapbook of Motherhood Firsts and A Scrapbook of Christmas Firsts (with Brenda Nixon.) These women have a lot of stories between them, including how they all met.

There is a great story behind how the authors of “A Scrapbook of Motherhood Firsts” met. We never did meet in person, all in one room. We became friends in an online Christian writers group, with two of us living in Ohio (Trish Berg and Karen Robbins), two of us living on ranches in Texas (Leslie Wilson and Cathy Messecar) and me (Terra Hangen) way out here in California.

Our tentative online friendship began in 2005 and as we shared our writing rejections and successes and cheered each other on, we shared our family stories and learned to cherish our friendships.

We call ourselves the Word Quilters, or WQs, and Karen is the only one in our group who has met each of us in person. Karen is a world traveler and has a blog about her travels, so you can see how she would be the one to meet us all.

We are a varied group, which adds lots of spice to our journey together. If I count correctly we have 16 children among us, so we must know something about being moms. I would hope so. One thing I know we agree on is that smiles and giggles can often save the day when raising children.

It turns out to be no surprise that many of our tips and stories in “A Scrapbook of Motherhood Firsts” have a touch of humor in them.  Funny one-liners that begin “you might be a mommy if …” are sprinkled throughout the book.

Karen shares about adopting two siblings, Trish’s If You Give a Mom a Minute is guaranteed to make you smile, Cathy writes about her granddaughter saying Amen at the end of stories,  Leslie shares about a child and cell phone conundrum, and I offer fun ideas on how to get your children out in your garden and exploring nature.

I adore gardening and share in our book how to use poles to create a garden teepee covered with vines, creating a secluded place where children can sit and dream or have adventures.

We even recommend our favorite cookbooks, wherein I admit I learned how to hard boil eggs in my favorite, The Joy of Cooking. Yes, when I began to cook even hard boiling eggs was daunting. That book really covers the basics.

All in all, we Word Quilters enjoy being moms, our friendship and writing books together. We hope our book will be a blessing to many moms, and an encouragement in the twists and turns of the parenting journey.