Super mom's super blog
The list of producers reads like a who's who in network television.
Good Morning America, CNN, FOX News, CBS and WMAQ-TV are just the latest to try to book an interview with Dawn Meehan of the Northwest suburbs, who just happens to be a mother of six.
And that doesn't count the publisher, literary agents, movie producers and Nickelodeon television officials who have tried to pitch ideas over the last few weeks.
Their interest? They all are responding to the stories of life with her active brood, posted on her blog -- mom2my6pack.blogspot.com. Her popularity is evident on the site, with each posting getting a hundred or more comments. Her blog averages 30,000 to 40,000 hits per day.
Interest in her blog exploded when posted a blog-like entry she posted with an item she sold on eBay.
"Lot of Pokemon Cards that My Kids Tried to Sneak By Me," the listing read. It went on to describe Meehan's trip to the grocery store, with all six in tow, and the crazy mishaps that happened along the way -- including sneaking in the aforementioned trading cards.
"We begin in the produce section where all these wonderfully, artistically arranged pyramids of fruit stand," Meehan explains. "There is something so irresistibly appealing about the apple on the bottom of the pile that a child cannot help but try to touch it. Much like a bug to a zapper, the child is drawn to this piece of fruit.
"I turn around to the sounds of apples cascading down the display and onto the floor," she continues. "Like Indiana Jones, there stands my son holding the all-consuming treasure that he just HAD to get and gazing at me with this dumbfounded look as if to say, 'Did you see that??? Wow! I never thought that would happen!' "
Through the posting, Meehan referred people to her blog.
Meehan concedes she never expected this kind of attention, when she posted her first item on eBay over two years ago now, and enhanced it with a description of her son shattering a light bulb while playing baseball in her bedroom.
The entry drew thousands of hits, and wound up selling for a whopping $1,100. But it wasn't the money that inspired her to try again. It was the response she drew to her narrative.
"I always liked to tell stories about my kids to my friends, and people kept saying I should write a book," said Meehan recently.
After the first eBay response, Meehan took their advice to heart. She started writing down stories about her kids' antics, and journaling them in a blog. It grew slowly, she says, five to 10 hits a day in the beginning.
"I had lofty dreams, that if I got up to 100 hits a day, I could include advertisers on the site, and earn some money," Meehan says.
With the most recent interest in her eBay posting, which refers visitors to her blog, her site jumped to 94,000 hits -- overnight -- and even now that the auction has closed, she still averages between 30,000-40,000 hits day on the blog.
On one recent morning, her day started early, with a phone call from a WGN Radio producer -- at 6 a.m. -- asking her to do a phone interview with morning host, Spike O'Dell.
She bounced from that to getting the children up and off to school, before heading to the hospital for a blood test for one child, while keeping the younger children entertained, before the older two returned home from school, and all amid phone calls from media outlets.
"It's been a whirlwind," she concedes. "My brain feels like mush."
Her mother, Diana Damalas of Huntley, sometimes helps out by watching the children. While she candidly admits she does not know how her daughter handles it all, she adds that she is not surprised at the interest her writing is drawing.
"She has always had talent with writing and words," Damalas says. "She's very creative and imaginative."
Meehan grew up in Hoffman Estates and attended Fremd High School, where she pursued her writing and appeared in many of the school's theater productions. Even now, she performs on stage, every year in her church's dinner theater shows.
Last March, Meehan starred as one of the wicked old aunts in "Arsenic and Old Lace" at Our Savior's United Methodist Church in Schaumburg, with, among others, former television weatherman, Harry Volkman.
Meehan did not attend college, but instead worked a series of odd jobs before meeting Joe Meehan, and marrying. He works both in the maintenance department of a local school district and as a self-employed remodeler, or roughly the equivalent of two full time jobs to support the family.
"I do my writing at night," Dawn Meehan said. "I stay up really late, when things are quiet, to write and check in on my blog."
Lately, she concedes she is more seriously entertaining the offers to write that book. She has an interview lined up with a prospective publisher and she is trying to decide between literary agents.
As for material for that book, that appears to be no problem.
"People always tell me I'm so funny, and that I remind them of Erma Bombeck," Meehan adds. "It's not that I'm funny, it's my kids. They do some of the funniest things."