A part of me says, “Wow, has it already been eight years since your first blog post?” And another part of me says, “Seriously, it’s only been eight years? Seems like much longer than that.” Well, in a way I suppose it has been. I created my first website dedicated to photos and stories about the kids back when I was pregnant with Tristan (heh, using my mad HTML skills, Front Page and a Geocities site!) so that’s going back about a dozen years. But it’s been eight years this week since I’ve been on the bloggy bandwagon.
Every couple of years I like to haul out the first meme I ever did (memes were good, eh? I miss memes) and use it as an excuse to wax blatantly nostalgic.
15 years ago today I would have been:
- About to graduate magna cum laude from the University of Ottawa with a degree in Comms, after going part-time nights for six years to get my degree
- Freshly appointed to a mid-level program management beancounter job and feeling like a young professional for the first time
- Living in a tiny third-floor attic apartment in the Glebe with Beloved and starting to think about wedding plans for the next year
10 years ago today I would have been:
- Getting ready to come back to work after my first year of maternity leave
- Tempering my dismay at the end of mat leave with huge excitement about coming back to a new job: my first job in public affairs (where I still work today)
- A couple of months away from finding and buying our townhouse in Barrhaven and then finding out I was pregnant with Simon
5 years ago today I would have been:
- Hugely pregnant and overdue with Lucas, and liveblogging the lack of labour and then, finally, the labour and arrival of the “player to be named later” (the posts from my pregnancy with Lucas still seem like the glory days of the blog community. I miss those days!)
- Did I mention hugely pregnant?
- And overdue?
1 year ago today I would have been:
- Happy to be back with public affairs, this time managing the social media team (I love my job!)
- Enrolling “baby” Lucas in junior kindergarten
- Finding my groove and kicking off a very successful year with the photography business
This year I am:
- Thinking about blog and website makeovers (now taking suggestions!)
- Contemplating changing the photography business name
- Feeling busy and involved but (blissfully!) not overwhelmed… most of the time
Today I am:
- In the midst of birthday season mayhem
- Feeling much more confident about my parenting skills than I was 10 years ago
- Happy
Next year I hope:
- To have saved enough from the photography business for the full-frame camera I’ve been coveting
- To do more travel with the family
- To be done with daycare forever
In five years I hope:
- To be wrangling with Tristan over getting his (gasp!) driver’s license!
- To be considering a return to full-time employment (to top up my last years of income before retirement!)
- To have renovated the kitchen and the basement family room
I was going to include a checklist of which prognostications and goals I got right and wrong in prior years but this is getting long, so I’ll save that for another day.
Funny that I’ve now got blog posts in the archives that cover so many of these highlights! I wonder if I’ll ever get to a version where I say, “15 years ago I launched this blog, using (snicker) a keyboard and a PC!” and we’ll all laugh about how quaintly antiquated it all was?
