A Year of Blogging

At some point this month my blog turned one year old.  I’m not quite sure on what day that fell because, not expecting my interest in blogging to last any real length of time, I declined to write the date down.

I started writing a blog because I couldn’t quite believe that I was finally pregnant and I wanted to record every wonderful moment for when I wasn’t pregnant any more.  At some point I realised that only my mum was reading my blog and took to my personal facebook page, asking my friends and family to take a glance and maybe ‘like’ my blog facebook page. My mum shared it amongst her colleagues and suddenly, 90% of my readership came from Busybees Nursery in Chislehurst.  It was around the two-month mark when I realised that readers aren’t bestowed upon one by the Kind Fairy of Good Authorship and so I signed up to twitter and to my delight, found an incredible community of mothers and writers doing a similar thing to what I was doing (only, in most cases, better).

Although the twins’ birth was a disaster mitigated only by the twins making it into the world unscathed, I loved sharing their birth photographs with you.  Thank you for supporting me when we were readmitted to hospital when the twins were four days old and for sharing in Lysander’s cancer scare that turned out to be a haemangioma.  It meant a lot that my blogging community had our backs.  Thank you too for your kindness and comments when I posted about the Dolce and Gabbana ‘synthetic babies’ controversy.

Blogging has opened up an exciting world for me.  I met many of you at Britmums Live in June and can hardly wait to party with some of you again at the MAD Blog Awards next month.  It still seems a little surreal that my blog made the final in not one but two categories – thank you so much for voting for me.  Camping in the New Forest with some fellow bloggers this summer was such a giggle and I would never have taken baby twins and a dog to camp at a vegan food festival if I hadn’t started blogging.

Some of you have become my good friends.  I’ve sat out in Embankment Gardens sipping frappeccinos whilst Vickie from Honest Mum made me laugh until my sides hurt.  Becky from Mummy Adventure came with me to the kids’ fashion show earlier in the summer, something that I would never have thought to do myself, and from there I made some incredible contacts in the baby fashion industry that I’m proud to promote in my ‘What the Twins Wore For’ series.  In fact, my friends from Lilly and Sid recently sent the twins a beautiful gift ‘just because’, which made me realise just how powerful the brand and blogger relationship is when it goes right.  The incredible Louise from 23 Week Socks has kindly agreed to come to the MADs with me as my blogging +1 and I can’t wait to see her again.  Through my blog I’ve also found my ‘family dynamic twin’ on the other side of the world, a two-mum family from Australia with twins the same age as mine, and I’m looking forward to exchanging battle tales with them in London next month.

You are my community.  Thank you for reading, for commenting.  For sharing in the twins’ milestones and our parenting adventures.  It’s been a jolly good year.