A Year Ago

A year ago today we wrote our first post for this blog. It was a very simple and short post but this post was the beginning of what I like to call a journey...the start of this blog.

This year has been a year of learning. I have learned a lot about the blogging world, social networking, html coding, link parties, advertising, and even some silly things like how to properly spell etc.  I have also learned a lot about myself. Holly and I recently had a conversation about this blog.  We talked a lot about how we have been doing things and both felt like something was missing.  We eventually came to the conclusion that our focus has changed over the last year. We have become so focused on growing our blog and keeping up with blogging trends that we have forgotten the real reason we started blogging.

We originally started this blog for a couple reasons:

1-We wanted this blog to be a collection of things we could refer back to for future use. (Example: preschool lessons)

2-We wanted a way to share things with each other. (We live 12,000 miles from each other and wanted away to stay in touch and share ideas)

3-We wanted others to benefit from the things we put together.  We plan a lot of different activities for our children/family and create some fun printables and wanted more people to benefit from these things.

4-We feel like motherhood is a special blessing we and many others enjoy but it can also be hard.  Our hope was to inspire and motivate other moms through blogging.

We have realized that in order to continue blogging we need to remember the reason we started blogging. We need to blog for us and remember our purpose.  You have probably noticed a couple changes around here.

1-We have changed our blog design.  We hope this design and the addition of the tabs will make it  easier for readers to navigate while also making it easier for us to keep things updated.

2-We are no longer sharing posts on a schedule.  Schedules mean deadlines and create unnecessary stress, we are blogging for us, not as a business and so we will share posts when we want to.  We hope to each share at least one post a week but our families come first.  Our family is our life, this blog is our hobby.

3-We won't be focusing on building our blog.  We feel that we have some wonderful followers-thanks everyone! We currently have about 5,000 pageviews/day, 303 followers and 111 subscribers.  We are very happy with our following and want to spend our time sharing the things we love, not worrying about numbers!

4-We will blog with purpose! We plan to start a year long series starting in January 2013. We are excited to start this series and share it with you here on our blog.

Thanks everyone for a wonderful year, we hope to make this upcoming one even better!