My Blog Turned Three

My little blog turned three this week – a chubby toddler running around curious and uninhibited! A big thanks to all of you for your interest and support! I truly appreciate your visits and love our comment chats!

To celebrate this milestone, as I’ve done the two previous times, I’m going to recap the past blogging year (February to January) in a gallery and highlight some links. I didn’t do this when 2017 ended because I was saving my recap for this very occasion.

A photo from each blogging month

The only baby photo I’ve published

Two of my favorite posts from the past blogging year were:

Where were you in the 80’s?

and a travel photo post about Estancia Harberton.

I was planning on doing a sequel with the rest of my Harberton photos, but almost a year has gone by and it’s still a draft – where did the time go?!

Of course, I also did photo posts…

…participated in WPC challenges…

…indulged in some nostalgia…

…wrote some flash fiction…

…posted travel stories…

…and incidents…

…Helsinki posts…

…and nature posts.

If you’re into statistics, This Is Travel was my best performing post based on likes. But it’s not one of my personal favorites at all! Written in about 2 minutes, as opposed to some posts which I edit and re-edit for months, this post must’ve been shared somewhere good because of all the extra traffic it received. But, unfortunately, I never got a pingback or other indication of where that might have been, so I have no idea.

I’m always thrilled to see shares in my stats (not that I look at my stats very often – less and less, actually), but I always wonder who shared it and what kind of response it got. I’m not on Facebook, for example, but I see Facebook shares all the time. Who knows where our posts and photos end up!

The post that got the most comments was the one where I told you that I was having twins and I want to thank you all for your wonderful, lovely responses and wishes! This is exactly why I love blogging, this is such a nice community! I’m reminded that most people on this planet are lovely, caring human beings who just want peace and friendship across borders.

Obviously, this past blogging year my life completely changed since I had the babies. I didn’t travel at all, and I have been posting a bit less. Still, I feel like I post too often and would like to learn to direct my focus onto quality rather than quantity.

As for the future, the blog’s content will also evolve, like life, and slowly take on new directions. Luckily I’m not on any kind of schedule – I’ll just go with the flow.

While I was writing this, I noticed that in last year’s recap post, I forgot to mention two posts I enjoyed writing – can you believe I am remembering to mention them now, a year later? Amazing how the memory works. If you have some extra time (and who doesn’t – just kidding!), pop over and have a read:

Blinking Lights of Tokyo
Wandering Around Tokyo

And…

A “real-life” friend of mine recently said to me, in an amused voice: “Oh, so you’re still into that blogging thing?”

Of course I am – this is my hobby now, an outlet for my creativity and a way to practice writing… and maybe one day improve my photography. I don’t do this because it’s a chore or because I want to achieve something specific. It’s a way of relaxing and collecting my thoughts. I do it when other people would watch TV, I guess. I can’t really concentrate on TV shows anymore, my mind keeps wandering too much.

And I’m so happy to have found other bloggers who share some of my thoughts and understand what the point is to this whole “blogging thing”.

Having recently had babies means I spend a lot of time at home and it fits well with blogging. When the weather gets better, we’ll be spending more time outdoors, but for now, I blog when I have a moment during the babies’ naps if the chores are done, or during the evenings once they’ve gone to sleep. Just because I have babies now doesn’t mean that I’ve completely lost interest in everything I used to enjoy doing before. I’m still the same person – just more, now.

When my family moved to Finland from Australia some thirty years ago, I was almost nine and I missed my Australian friends. So we wrote letters. Long letters, sometimes up to 30 pages with text on both sides, and we wrote lots of them! Sometimes we sent tape recordings where we chatted away and once I even received a video cassette – oh that was so modern and cool! I treasured it. This lasted all through my teen years until email came into our lives and we got lazy.

Throughout those years, I somehow ended up corresponding with other kids my age all around the world. Kids I didn’t know, but we exchanged photos. The only one I ever met up with in real life was an Italian girl and, amazingly, we are still in contact occasionally – not often, but still. She used to make her own envelopes in a very creative way, using colorful pages from magazines. I remember one envelope had a Benetton ad which was very beautiful. She also drew different types of smileys on her letters, way before anyone ever thought of calling them emojis!

At some point there were these little friendship books that were passed along with our regular letters. You made them yourself and filled in the first page. Then everyone who received it would fill in another page and when it was full, you’d return it to its maker. On your little page you wrote whatever you wanted, usually telling what you liked doing in life, what music you were into, and if you wanted new penpals you could leave your address and some of the people reading it later on might write to you.

It probably wasn’t a very cool thing to be doing back then! But I loved it. I chatted away with kids from all over the world and it felt so natural. In retrospect, we were just ahead of our time with our own little profile pages, international chatting, and emojis!

Knowing this, you won’t have to wonder whether I’m still into this blogging thing. It’s in my blood. I’ve been doing this all my life!

I don’t know what the world will be like when my babies are grown up, whether WordPress will still exist (probably not), but maybe, just maybe they will somehow find and read these posts one day and get to know me from another point of view. (If you’re reading this in the future, hello boys!)

Thanks for visiting! Here’s to the next blogging year – let’s stay in touch!