I'm Jen Eyer, and I'm thrilled to be on the Community team at AnnArbor.com.

A bit about myself. My husband, Kevin, and I have lived in Ann Arbor for 10 years, and I honestly can't imagine wanting to live anywhere else while raising our family. We have two children, Annabelle, 6, and Wes, almost 3, and two golden retrievers - all of whom make for a lively atmosphere in our house!

I have previously worked as a news producer at MLive, a reporter at the Brighton Argus, as Suburban Life editor at the Troy Eccentric, and as managing editor of Ford Motor Co.'s global intranet news site. I also used to freelance for the Ann Arbor News. My true passion, though, is blogging, and after five and a half years, my first-ever post is still as good an illustration as any of why I do it.

In early 2004, I was working at MLive and, as the mom of a six-month-old, I was also dealing with the daily bombardment of fear-mongering from the news industry that parents face. One day I read an alarming but insufficient article on BabyCenter about the chemical BPA leaching from baby bottles, and decided to do my own research. The data I found was worrisome enough, I felt, to warrant a change, so I threw out all of our plastic bottles and replaced them with glass. Then, thinking that other parents could benefit from what I had just learned, I started a blog, which I named "Neurotic Mom," and chronicled the bottle crisis in that first post.

It was a good feeling to not only resolve a concern of mine, but also share the solution with others. In the years since, I have found blogging to be almost therapeutic, in that writing publicly often motivates me to explore solutions to our family's problems more completely than I might otherwise. It also helps me sort out the real concerns from the junk science, thereby keeping my worries under control.

But what I love most about blogging is the interaction with readers. So many moms have told me that they love the name Neurotic Mom because that's how they feel too — and reading my blog helps them feel they're not alone. It's a way to get connected.

This passion for connectedness is why I am so excited to be helping build online communities at AnnArbor.com, on a whole range of topics, from Food and Drink to Neighborhoods. I'm especially hopeful for the topic of Parenting (which you can find by clicking the Parenting tag). I've spent the past two months recruiting and assembling a team of parent contributors, and they are a wonderful, talented group. You can read about them in detail here. Some are professional writers, and some are experts in certain subjects, like cooking or relationships. All are passionate about being the best parents they can be.

Together we are building an intensely local, online community of parents, with the contributors and me sharing stories, concerns, resources and information, and readers hopefully coming back with their own.

I hope you'll join the conversation.

Jen Eyer is on the Community Team at AnnArbor.com. She can be reached at 734-623-2577 or jeneyer@annarbor.com, or you can visit her at the first floor office at 301 East Liberty.