When I don’t post for a few days, I get a little twitchy. When I can’t post for a few days, it’s amazing how seriously twitchy I get. Over the past five years, I’ve become so accustomed to having a thought and getting it down on virtual paper, that when I am somehow unable–work, lack of internet access, falling down a rabbit hole–it’s like that missing limb feeling.

But! Now you see I’ve had a perfectly good excuse. Surprise!

Behold the brand new, fancy, 2011-esque blog complete with the 2011 bloggy stuff you kids are using these days. I think they’re called plug-ins? Eh, I can figure that out later.

Don’t panic, all ye change-averse readers. It’s the same Mom-101 on the inside. Just imagine that I sent the old blog in for a little Real Housewives-style retouching last week, with the hopes that you wouldn’t trade me in for a younger, newer blog. One with perkier HTML and more bounce to the CSS.

I must admit, there is a part of me that will miss my sad, brown, off-center banner that I made myself in a fit of misguided art direction envy–then never changed.

I’ll miss the days that commenting took precedent over sharing. Although I sure do love the sharing. I’ll miss the days that linking back to others was more important than linking back to yourself. (Which is why I decided it was important to maintain a blogroll here, even if the list needs some major freshening up itself.) And I’ll miss the notion that once, in the early blogging days back when we killed our food with our bare hands and fashioned the pelts into clothing without fear of PETA retribution, what your blog looked like was significantly less important than what it read like.

Still, I’m as superficial as the next gal, and I cannot stop staring at my pretty new blog. (It is pretty, right?) I must give huge thanks to the talented Elan, aka Schmutzie of Ninjamatics for design work that makes even a picky advertising chick happy. And more thanks to the fearless Dawn Blanchfield of Elfini, who completed a the scariest Blogger-to-Wordpress move in history without turning to the liquor. That I know of.

To go with my pretty new blog, there are some other 2.0-y things that I’m experimenting with. Like a Mom-101 Facebook page. Be warned: I have no idea what to do with it. My last suggestion was to use it to have a key party. Only Jeff seems to have liked that idea. Also, I think it’s time to write a page here that tells PR people that, crazy though it sounds, this blog is not a hotbed of activity for household cleaning product reviews and giveaways.

With all due respect to you household cleaning product review bloggers, of course.

I’m sure I’ll also want to do other things to like update my about page, figure out what some of these WordPress things mean (“Multimedia Box Code?” WTF?), and oh, say, find the entire lot of comments from my first six months of blogging that did not make the import. I’m sure they just got stuck on an A train running on the local track because of heavy weekend construction. They’ll catch up soon.

But the most important thing that I’ve brought to my new pad: You. Thank you.

So…what do you think?