A Winner & The Blog Frog Rocks!

First off, the winner of my impromptu mini contest is Abbie! She was the first one to guess the correct answer, which was The OC! Abbie, get in touch with me and I'll send you your $10 Target gift card! Hopefully you like Target...but how could you not? It's the best!

For those of you who were stumped, Seth and Summer were a couple who were arguably the best part of a show called the OC that aired when I was in college. It was a case of unrequited love at first, but they were one of the very best couples ever on tv. When I was talking about my Seth and his friend Summer to a friend of mine one day, it hit me! They're meant to be!

It's actually funny on another level, too. When we were choosing names when I was pregnant with Eli and then with Seth, there were a trio of names that kept circling around. Brody was my absolute favorite, I liked Seth as a middle name, and I loved the name Koen. Problem was, the character on the OC was named Seth Cohen and the actor's name in real life was Adam Brody. I was concerned people woud think my baby's name was a tribute to a character or an actor, and as cute as Seth Cohen/Adam Brody is, that just wasn't the case!

In the end, Eli looked nothing like a Brody or a Koen, so he became Elias. The names stuck around for my pregnancy with Seth, though, except that the name Seth was everywhere I looked. When I found out I was pregnant, I was reading a book that had a Seth as the main character. Then I found out that the name meant "Appointed" or "God has granted" and was special because Seth, Adam and Eve's third son, was appointed to take over Abel's responsibilities. Then we found out that there was a tradition in Puritan families to name the first sibling born after the death of a child Seth, to honor the child who died.  When I prayed, the name would just pop into my head. 

By the time we found out that our baby , our third son, and first son after the loss of Eli was a boy at 15 weeks, it was pretty obvious that Seth was supposed to be his name. We weren't sure if we'd have any more babies, so I wanted Brody in there somewhere, and he became Seth Broderick. I liked the name so much I I decided not to worry about whether or not people would put the Seth Cohn/Adam Brody reference together, and I have to say I am so glad I did! I love Seth's name! It's fits him perfectly...he's our Seth B. 

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In other news, you'll notice a new widget above the Blog Frog widget on the right sidebar. It links to the community of Profoundly Seth, and I posted a question there for you all. I'd love to read your input. I can't tell you how much I appreciate all of your support and love, and as Profoundly Seth enters a bit of a crossroads in that we are getting past the hustle and bustle of battling for a surgery and surviving it, I want to hear from you what you're interested in reading about. I would love to branch out and not just write about Seth, if you're all ok with that! I mean, I guess I could do it even if you didn't like it, but I love the interaction with you all and want you to be happy when you're here. In fact, I'd love it if the Blog Frog community was used to share stories and resources in a way that it's not so easy to do in posts here. Yes, I'm a dork. 

Rusty, and now Holly, the newest member of the Blog Frog team, have done an amazing job setting up a great community of bloggers. Be joining their site, it makes it really easy to network and meet new friends, which is a big part of why we all do this.  When you join a community, your most recent posts get listed on the community pages, which both bring you traffic and make it easy for me to read the blogs of our friends who are supporting Seth!

When we were fundraising for Seth's surgery, we advertised with The Blog Frog and it was an amazingly simple and fun process! It took about two seconds to sign up and really did increase the traffic to the blog. It's definitely worth trying out if you want an influx of new readers! If you'd like to check out how to advertise with the Blog Frog, or how to add their widgets to your blog, just click here.