The first blog post! A special moment.
The majority of visitors to my website will never find themselves here. They’ll probably extract the information they need, maybe sign up to the email list to receive new posts if they enjoy what they read but they probably won’t spend too much time digging around in the archives reading obscure posts.
Not me, if I enjoy a blog I like to go back to the beginning and see where it all began. So for all those readers like me here’s how I got here (by here I mean about to start a blog, not life in general).
I first discovered blogging back in 2008. At the time I happened to have a lot of time on my hands so I thought I would give it a go. I didn’t really have a lot to say and after a few months it fizzled out but the idea stuck. I had a lot of fun researching and writing the posts and I always thought it’s something I would pick up again.
Life happened, I got married, we started a business, we had a major house move and we had two children. It was when child number one arrived (the Ted of the title) that I started reading blogs again. In between, I had dipped in occasionally to the blogosphere (is that still a thing?) but I hadn’t spent any time there.
This time, instead of the travel blogs I was devouring first time round, I was mostly reading blogs from mums who, like me, were finding parenthood hard. Turns out that’s normal! I had no idea and they really helped me to feel ok about myself again.
I will never lie about how hard children can be sometimes. My children are incredible, they are my inspiration, but life with them has been a challenge from the start. I don’t see the point in publicly glossing over the bits where we struggle, it just makes other parents think they are doing something wrong because everything they do isn’t always sunshine and rainbows.
However, this isn’t one of those blogs. When I started thinking about what I wanted to write about I thought back to my 2008 blog and what I was reading back then and I immediately hit upon family travel as a theme. Well, it turns out there are a lot of those. I have no idea whether this blog will be any good, I am filled with self-doubt whenever I read others. My hope is that at the very least I will enjoy writing it and I have my fingers crossed that just maybe others will enjoy reading it.
