August has come and gone. I can’t believe it’s already September. For most, that means back to school. For us, that means we’ve been blogging for ONE YEAR! Yep, it’s been a whole year since our first post, when we moved into our new house. We’ll ‘celebrate’ this next week with a fun post, but before we look back at the whole year, here’s a recap of August in the RatnamResidence…
The Blog
23,764 all-time visits. Whew, that’s a lot for our first year!
2,286 visitors checked us out this month. Where do they come from? The top FOUR countries are:
1 US 2 Canada 3 UK 4 India
It’s pretty cool that people across the world are checking us out from countries like Australia and the Philipines. What I wonder is, where our readers come from within the US. Hey WordPress, can you give us a map showing that too? Any other bloggers wish they could see that too?
125 Followers. 11 people have joined us in the past month! Who are they? Victoria Elizabeth Barnes (She’s blogging about renovating her 1890 Victorian Home), Kate (She and her husband take adventures with their little one in tow), Natalie and Maya (They have a design studio and blog about design, fashion, and food. I heart their website design)…
28 people searched the net for ‘bumbo seat’ and stumbled upon us. Maybe this is because of the recent recall for bumbo seats? Do you have a bumbo seat? What are you doing with it now that it’s recalled? Other popular search terms to find us were:
19 Posts. Bleh, not ideal as I hope to post daily M-F, but typically one day a week I skip because I’m swamped at work or have to run out for errands at lunch (when I typically write). How often do you post to your blog, and how do you find time to!?
The Residents
1 Duck trophy. I won the annual duck race at our Chinese New Year themed family reunion. And Vinay ‘volenteered’ to be on the committe to plan next year’s reunion!
2 Avery took his first two steps while we were in California. Didn’t surprise us, as Avery started crawling our last trip out there! He is now on the move, walking everywhere! I can’t believe he’s almost a toddler! He even said his first words this month!
3 I am knee deep into the three books of the ‘Fifty Shades series‘… Loving them! Reading is a nice escape and great for relaxing right before bed – I even escaped one day during lunch to read because I couldn’t put the book down!
11 items on my ‘to do’ list on our rainy weekend. We got lots done and Avery loved ‘helping’.
16 Avery had his sixteenth doctor’s appointment this year – they found another ear infection. Avery stayed home with Daddy for a day on antibiotics before returning to daycare. He’s all better and no penguins were hurt in the process…
50 I must have sent out over 50 invitations to Avery’s First Birthday Party. And come to think of it, I only have 12 RSVPs so far… come on people… has the RSVP died? I bet the week of the party I’ll hear from the remaining 30 something invitees.
9 I waited nine long months since Vinay gave me tickets at Christmas – to Country Fest. We enjoyed a fun date night together listening to Tim McGraw and Kenny Chesney.
430 Is the new time Avery and I get home every day. Our new ‘schedule‘ with Avery’s new daycare means less commuting and we’re home earlier!
The Residence
0 After our unexpected trip to California, we stayed home the month of August – sticking with our plan to travel less and spend more time at home as a family relaxing and resting from our busy week.
2 We had zero pieces of furniture for a week while we swapped out our ‘old’ sofa bed and got a TWO new pieces that are family friendly with an ottoman!
11 looming student loans left to pay off. Yay! I paid off one this past month and I’m chipping away at them with the goal of having them all paid off by my 30th birthday (3 years away), and then we can have little Ratnam #2!
Check out recaps from earlier in the year - January, February, March, April, May, June, July
Congrats on 1 year of blogging–that’s awesome, and thanks for the mention
I too would love to know where each reader was coming from the U.S…and I’m with you on the lack of RSVPers! We ran in to the same issue with B’s party.
Thanks, Kate. how did you prepare for B’s party if you didn’t know the # attending? I’m trying to decide on how much food to buy and not have to little but not be stuck with tons of leftovers…
By the time the date got really close, we had a pretty good idea of who was coming. We went through the list of non-responders, and thought about who would realistically come. I didn’t end up doing it, but I thought about emailing everyone who didn’t respond a week before. We kept it really low-key with just doughnuts & drinks (we had it at a local park), so we didn’t have as much to prepare, but we still ended up with 2 dozen extra doughnuts! We started giving them away to random people at the park
haha I love that… giving the donuts to strangers, so sweet.
Congratulations on your first bloggiversary! You might have to let me know the secret to getting nearly 24,000 visits in one year, that is pretty cool.
Haha, thanks! No secret – I just post pretty often I guess. 4-5 times/wk. I find I have a zillion things to blog about with the house and Avery that I never run out of things to say or write about.
Congrats! You’ve got a great blog!
Thanks!
Cheat! Audible is really great. Especially listening to The Help.
Ohhh this looks good. I spend lots of time commuting I was thinking books on tape might be good for me…