Well, Well, Well.

Here we are, day 30!  To be honest, I’m a little stunned that I actually managed to get a bit of blogging done every single day in November.  This included some seriously sick (or sick kid) days as well as several days of Thanksgiving.  And Sundays!  Sundays are one of my busiest days of the week.  And yet every single day I managed to find a little nugget of time to pop on here and share something.  Maybe I do have a few things to say after all.

I’ve had to think back to the reason I began blogging in the first place.  When I first started, blogging was very, very new.  No one did it, so I did.  I decided to start blogging to share my family with far away family- and also to chronicle recipes.  Those right there are the core of why I began in the first place.   There have been so many changes since then, as I’ve tried to maneuver my way through this blogging world that has changed so drastically since I began in April of 2005.

As I mentioned during Thanksgiving week, it saddened me to look back and see very little posted about the past two Thanksgivings, because being able to look back is a huge reason for me to continue blogging.  I like looking at years past and seeing what date spring actually arrived.  I like looking at holidays in the past and seeing exactly how many Christmas cookies I ended up making that I said I wasn’t going to make.

But along the way I think I got discouraged.  I had a rather large blog following at one time, and then I migrated to my own website.  While I love the new challenges that brought with, I easily lost half of my readership through the migration, and that really discouraged me.  It also didn’t help that at the time, blogs I’d been following for years started taking on an almost cult-like following.  Here I was blogging each and every day and if I averaged a comment a week I was doing well.  These huge blogs were garnering comments in the hundreds and thousands, and I started wondering what I was doing wrong.  But at the same time, I didn’t really want those hundreds of comments.  I prefer to keep my blog personal, and reply to the comments I get.  I couldn’t imagine how much time it would take to reply to all those comments- and while I understood why those blog owners didn’t reply to theirs… it just wasn’t a direction I wanted to take.

So I tried to focus a bit here and there, and just got all muddled up.  I think after spending each and every day in November first coming up with a blog subject, and then blogging, I think I’ve found a little bit of that spark that I first started with.  I love thinking that next November I’ll be able to look back at this one and really remember how the month went.   And so I’m really, really going to try and make an effort.  There were definitely days this month where I had so little time (or was so unwell that sitting at the computer was nauseating), and yet I still found that moment to spit of a little tidbit.  I’m going to try to keep at that.  I make no promises whatsoever,  and am not going to commit myself to any kind of quantity of posts per week or month.  But I will try.  It would be nice to be able to keep up in December with at least a little of the momentum I have going right now.  Even if all my posts end up revolving around the many ways to eat beans and rice, because Andy’s been laid off early this year, I can share those ways with a smile and a photo or two.

For the next few days though, we’ll see how the posting goes.  It’s Nutcracker week, and this proud Mommy has a whole lot to do this week!  For sure I will be sharing a picture or two over the next few days of my kids as they light up the stage with their spectacular dances.   It’s going to be a great couple of days, but we’ll see if I find any “stolen moments”  to slip in a blog post or two.