I have been thinking for a number of weeks now about my blog and what to do with it. I have even made a new blog template with a different name. I was wondering with so much time gone between since i last posted anything maybe i should start again. A fresh voice. But then i realised that everything that is here is part of what makes up the history of our family. I also got an email from our friend back home whose company hosts my blog I thought of all the work and effort put into making this site what it is and i have decided to keep it on.
But for now it will take a slightly different direction. Not that it necessarily had a certain direction before but things have changed. We have all changed and indeed i think blogging has changed. But our family has changed. We have moved to Australia for the time being, our kids are ripping towards being teenagers and in fact adults. I am thankfully out of the nappy stage, the pre-school stage and the dummy stage. Hoo-bloody-ray. Although obviously the drama of toddler years is swiftly exchanged for the high drama of teenagers. Which feels sort of similar but with much later bed times!
I have in the past year been diagnosed with an auto-immune disease, finally got a reason to the ‘are you always tired’ questions other than children and 13 years of night shifts! I have slipped a disc, discovering in the recovery that i do, in fact, have a bit of a bent spine. I have been the new girl at work after 13 years of being part of the furniture. I have been the main bread winner in our house for the first time since we got married.
So in that regard i felt that my blog should be different. I have toyed with the idea of vlogging -video blogging but i say far too many er…um’s when I’m talking or using instagram for micro blogging but the mobile only format means you have to sit and tap all text into a phone and as i can type pretty fast ( two degrees/dissertations will do that for you) if i have anything lengthy to say then i tend to give up out of sheer laziness and resort to a keyboard. I’ve also wondered about writing on tumblr and then sharing through instagram but you can’t actually do that. Instagram don’t allow a third party to post onto its site so that wouldn’t work and id have to use all sorts of links -which would mean that whatever incentive i had to write would be easily extinguished by the sheer effort of having to navigate different platforms. So after going round the houses and up the courtyards I am back to where it all started. Sometimes eh thats the way it works out.
Im keeping everything as it was…well apart from the glaring obvious change in design of my blog. I am very aware now that our kids have an online presence of their own and they may not want their cheery teen faces appearing on a mummy blog. So the look is a little bit different and the content may be different but I’m not going to ditch the name or the history. So if you want to scroll back to see my back to school posts and product reviews then you can. But largely that won’t be the direction I’m going in now. Primarily I want to write, which is ironically what got me into this in the first place. Yes there will be images, because who doesn’t want to look at something pretty. But generally i won’t be doing reviews or photography stuff.
I’m not after awards or rankings. I don’t want to go down the route of SEO and how many links i can get back to my site by commenting on as many others as possible. Thats what kind of killed it for me a lot before and look, i know that doing all that stuff is a choice anyway and you can decide to opt out of it without running away from your whole blog and for me it wasnt just that, but it was part of it. So this time it will be less about that. In fact not about that. I am actually, this time, writing for me.
We have all endured a big change as a family and largely i think we are winning. I like to embrace change if possible no matter how scary it may seem on the surface. No matter how much it pushes us outside of ourselves and stretching our muscles so much that we can still feel the sting long after. I know that some change comes easily welcomed like a cool breeze on a summer day. Other times its dirty and gnarly. Grinding metal against metal in the fire of what can feel like completely overwhelming pain. But whichever route we come to it, whether its painful or not. There is always a chance to grow and learn and adapt. Thats what we are all destined to do.
So here it is. The same old new thing.
