Our Halloween Party

We had so much fun two weekends ago when we hosted a lil Halloween party.  Who doesn't love a bit of dress-up? (Besides my hubby, he wore a pumpkin hat for a photo and that was it! But he was a great sport with helping with decor though.)

The kids really enjoyed it.  I want to make it a yearly thing that we host a Halloween party!

 

Lost my blogging mojo...

Oh dear, I've really lost my blogging mojo...

Here's a couple of reasons why:

I started blogging in 2010, right at the beginning of my pregnancy with Mia.  I used the Parent24 platform, which was really nice - lots of friendly bloggers, lots of interactions, and I made some very good friends that I met there!  However, after 2.5 years of blogging there, they changed their whole blogging interface and moved it to a new platform - one that was so different to the previous one, that everyone literally stopped blogging there within a few months.  That's when I moved over to Blogger and started this blog.

Often, at least once a month, I would refer back to my Parent24 blog, especially to read back to things I was doing with Mia when she was Ella's current age - things like craft activities, teething timeline, illness history, milestones, etc.

Recently, when trying to access my old blog, my heart stood still, when I couldn't find it, it just kept reverting back to the Parent24 homepage...  The blogs have been deleted!  This is truly one of my worst nightmares come true.  I never did a full back-up or import of all my posts on there.  Thankfully, I did keep lots of the really important posts in a Word Doc, like my birth story, letters to Mia, and some of the monthly updates.  But not all of them.  There's literally 2.5 years of posts, vanished.  Yes, I should have done a back-up...  But still, surely there could have been some sort of notification from the Parent24 team that this was going to happen...

I have tried to make contact with the Parent24 team to ask about the possibility of retrieving my posts, but haven't had any reply, unfortunately.

All in all, this has made me feel quite negative about blogging...  all the hours spent writing all those posts...  and that got me thinking, what guarantee do I have that the same couldn't happen just as easily to this blog?  Blogger might decide they've had enough and also press 'delete'!  Oh, the thought makes me shudder.  I'm starting to copy all my posts into a Word Doc, but it's going to take quite a while...

Then, the other reason I think I've lost my blogging mojo, is that I joined the SA Mom Blogs group on Facebook a couple of months ago, and also added my blog onto their "blog roll".  It's been such a nice way to get into touch with more bloggers, I've really enjoyed coming across so many wonderful blogs.  But - this also needs a lot of time - time that I don't have!!  To really make proper use of the SA Mom Blogs community, I think you need to take part a lot.  Need to comment on blogs, need to comment on Facebook posts, need to be sure to constantly be 'visible'...  And, unfortunately, I just have too many other priorities at the moment, to invest the necessary time and energy into building my blog's status...  As much as I would like to!

I love blogging though.  I love sharing what my girlies are up to.  I love reading blogs.
I'm definitely not going to stop blogging.  In fact, already have two posts lined up to share pics from Mia's school concert and our Halloween party.

Think I must just shake off the pressure I've put on myself to try and "be a good blogger" and just continue what I was doing - and save my posts on Word Doc from now on!
xx