2014 blog round up

This year I tried to work on my blog a bit more.  Ok, a lot more in terms of time spent.  There’s still a lot to do on it, and I’ve got some sorting out of my theme to go, but my blog’s grown and improved over the last year.

2014 saw my blog have:

1. New look, new theme.

Thanks to Ellie all at Sea, I have a smart header, blog badge and presence.  I also chose a new theme (how hard is that deciding!?), although I’ve had menu problems a few months after that I’ve not been able to sort out.  Next stage for 2015 is to get someone to customise my theme, picking out all the things I want on my blog that I can’t currently do.

1. Linkies

I’ve always taken part in linkies, but in 2014 I started a couple of my own.  The first one is Music Exploration for children, trying to encourage N to experience more styles of music rather than just rock. It’s fairly niche, but I have a couple of people regularly linking up.  It opens on the 15th of each month, so if your children love music, feel free to link up a post about music and kids.  We’re really enjoying the music side of things, and it’s great to find other families to get ideas of what I can do with N.

My second linky was born out of my Month of Firsts post.  Each month I now do an update of what firsts we’ve done, alone or as a family. If you do a similar round up you can link up from the 1st of each month.

1. Challenges

For the first time I took part in Project 365, taking a photo each day for a year.  It’s been hard going (especially in the winter months), but it’s been a great challenge to do (as well as a lovely friendly and supportive community to be part of.  It’s really helped me think about the photos I take, and notice a lot more around me.

N and I also did the 300 picture book challenge, with Childled Chaos.  We hit the 300 books around June, and although we’re still reading books, I was a bit rubbish at recording them once we’d hit the target, so I’ve no idea how many we’ve ready up until now.

My own reading was shocking this year so I think I’ve failed at my 52 book challenge.  I did quite well until March, then didn’t read anything until about September.  This is for someone who thinks of themselves as a bookworm.  I started reading again in September, and although I’ve not been counting I think I’ve probably caught up to about 40 in that time.  Shortish books I can read in a couple of hours, rather than huge tomes, but at least I’m back reading again.

Most popular posts

Of course, competitions have the biggest views, but remove those and here are my most popular posts for 2014.

1. How to help your child love the water. This post was shared by various Water Babies classes on Facebook, and had my highest number of daily views at 900 on one day.  I was amazed, but it does explain the struggles N went through with his water wobbles and how we got over them.

2. Emotional times at swimming lessons Bit of a theme.  We were lucky enough to have Water Babies sponsor us this year for Britmums, and we swim and blog for Water Babies, and the posts certainly seem to have helped parents talking their children swimming.  We’ve loved working with Water Babies, and of course our swimming lessons, and will be sad to graduate in a month’s time when N turns four.

3. British Tag – 12 questions for bloggers. I was surprised how much this got searched for on google.  But then I remembered trying to find the questions myself after being tagged.  Most were via YouTube so unsurprising really that my blog kept popping up in search engines for other people.

4.  Teach children star constellations. I don’t do many craft posts, but this one seemed to catch people’s imagination.  Something simple, Blue Peter style, perfect for learning constellations.

5. 7 tips for toilet training boys.  N finally toilet trained a couple of months after his 3rd birthday, off his own back, so I did a couple of posts about it. Although this was about boys, really it applied to girls as well.

So, that’s Bubbablue and me in 2014 in a nutshell.  Onward and upward to 2015.