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:

• ratnam residence
• baby schedule
• baby pool calendar

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