This month marks ONE YEAR since our first blog post. I’m psyched that I kept up with this for a whole year.  It’s been fun keeping in touch with family and friends around the world, sharing tips, tricks, triumphs, and mishaps with other bloggers, and inspiring friends to blog.  To kickoff our First Blogiversary celebration, here’s my Top 10 Reasons I Love to Blog:

1. Keep in Touch with Family & Friends

Although I grew up in a close-knit community of friends and family, we’re now all scattered across the world.  We’re all busy with family, careers, school, etc. so it’s difficult to keep in touch.  A sparatic phone call or email helps, but when you have a new house, husband, and baby, everyone wants to know AND SEE how things are going.  This blog allows me to share pictures and even videos of our renovation projects of the house, and of Avery as he grows.

2. Mommy Outlet

While the initial intent of this blog was to keep in touch with family and friends, it quickly turned into a perfect outlet for my mommy thoughts, questions, triumphs, and rants.  As a working mommy, I don’t have much ‘me time‘ and as much as I love my hubby and son, I need some time for me.  Some time to relax and get out my thoughts, a hobby that I enjoy outside of the everyday things I NEED to do.  This blog allows me to do that, and I can squeeze it in at lunch during the week and some nights after Avery has gone to bed.

3. It’s A Virtual ‘Baby Book’

Blogging about everything under our roof, especially what Avery is up to is a great way to document Avery’s first year with photos and videos.  I still keep the traditional ‘baby book’ but instead of printing photos and pasting them in the book – this is a much easier way to document Avery’s first year.

4. New Friends

I knew NOTHING about blogging and the world of bloggers when I started this adventure… I had no idea how much I would connect with other bloggers out there and how close we would become popping into each others lives via the internet.  It’s refreshing reading stories from other mommies, commenting on other home renovation projects, getting great DIY ideas from others, and especially getting feedback from them when I post something.

5. Comments  I heart the feedback when I post something.  Sometimes I’m excited to share what Avery’s doing, or stressed about him STILL not sleeping through the night, or sometime we need help picking a paint color. Whatever the post is about, I love getting an email telling me we have a new comment!  I’m always excited to see who it is and what they have to contribute to the discussion.  Sometimes its another blogger, and other times it’s a dear old friend from college, or a distant relative in India!

6. It’s Cheap! And for anyone, it can be free.  I spend $18 a year on our domain name “www.RatnamResidence.com” because I’m anal like that and had to have a theme and name for our blog so I had a direction for what I was blogging about.  What other hobbies cost less than $20 a year!?

7. Inspiring Others  I don’t blog to make an influence on the world, or on anyone in particular – but apparently I have.  I had one woman respond to my health kick this past spring that I inspired her to start working out.  How cool is that?!  And I’ve won a few awards in the blogging world, all nominations by other bloggers – pretty cool.  Oh, and did I mention, two friends of mine have started blogging – not solely because of me, but because our blog made an influence on them?  Sharing the blog love… www.DaretoDesert.com & www.Kouzmitch.com

8. Ideas Ideas Ideas Have I mentioned how much I hate love Pinterest?  That site is amazing.  So many ideas – but they overwhelm me and I get frustrated because I want to try to make this and buy that and do a project like that…  because of that, I have to limit my Pinterest browsing.  Reading other blogs (when I have a spare minute) gives me some great ideas…whether they are recipes, or quick and easy DIY projects.  It’s a lot less overwhelming than the smorgasbord over at Pin-sanity.

9. I am an Expert well, maybe not an expert, but I get to share my opinions, tips, tricks, and knowledge I’ve learned with others.  Other mommy questions I can help with, I give my two cents.  Someone wants an opinion on the room they are redesigning, I pipe in.  I may not have the ‘right’ answer, but I might be able to help someone.

10. It’s FUN! Many things in day-to-day life are monotonous, especially when you have a house and family.  There’s dishes to wash, bags to pack for daycare, laundry to fold, the sump pump died again, there’s a leak in the ceiling, oh crap we ran out of formula gotta run to the store…. every day is a dance to get as much as possible done so tomorrow things aren’t piled up and most of it isn’t exactly ‘fun’ although we try to make them best of them.  Blogging is always fun

How long have you been blogging?  What do you love about it?

We’ll continue the celebration later this month with:

• Blogiversary I: The Year in Photos We’ll recap this past year of blogging in a photo montage, capturing our favorite moments this past year