15 years of blogging

On 1st August 2011, I clicked a couple of links on my friend’s blog on a whim. And suddenly my own blog was there staring me in the face, ready for me to start writing.

I’d been compiling lists of all the funny things my kids said (they were then aged 5, 7 and 10) and had wanted an outlet to share them, but hadn’t put any thought to how or where or when. But now I had a blog! I spent about 30 seconds thinking of the name MumofThree World. It did exactly what it said on the tin – I was a mum of three and this was my world.

I added the questions to my blog for a few weeks, until they ran out. Then I started to think about other things to write. Pretty soon, I was writing every day, about everything that happened to us and everything that mattered to me.

I never thought I would be blogging even a year later, yet here I am 15 years later and I’m still going.

I shared my pride, I shared my frustration and I shared everything in between. Parenting three primary age kids is full-on and relentless and I wrote about it all. I always asked myself, ‘Would I tell this to my friends in the office?’. If I would, I shared it on my blog.

My kids were always anonymous. I didn’t share their photos and I didn’t name them, which was unusual in the blogging world at the time. It meant I didn’t get the reviews of expensive things and the big paid gigs that were so common back then, but my priority was always keeping my kids safe and sharing our stories – the good, the bad and the ugly.

My first audience was real life friends through Facebook. I then joined Twitter and started to make connections with other parents and parent bloggers, who seemed to like what I was doing. I joined networks like Britmums and Tots100 and got to know more bloggers. And I just kept writing!

I made blogging friends, some of whom I’m still friends with today. I made it to the finals of the MAD Blog Awards twice and was shortlisted for the Brilliance in Blogging (BiBs) awards.

I joined linkies, sometimes on a particular subject and sometimes just sharing anything. I’d spend hours reading 20 or 30 posts by other people in the hope they would return the favour. Surely suddenly everyone would realise how brilliant my blog was and it would become famous? If I was lucky, five or six people would read my blog in return for all that time.

One of the linkies was Silent Sunday – a photo with no words every Sunday. I still share one of those to this day. After about a year of blogging, I started sharing book reviews. These became weekly as I started to read more. Now I read even more, so I often share two a week.

As the kids got older, inevitably I started writing less about them. Their lives were their own and not to be shared with strangers on the internet. But I would still share pride in their achievements from time to time and my own feelings about them growing up and moving on.

As they needed me less, I started doing more of what I liked doing – mainly running. We also had Hetty join our family, which gave me a whole new subject to write about.

Fifteen years on from that first blogpost, I’m blogging about three times a week – one book review, one Silent Sunday post and a post about something else in my life. The online world has changed in that time. Blogging was the big thing, but it got overtaken by YouTube vlogs, Instagram and TikTok. As someone who writes for a living and reads a lot, I’m far more comfortable with words than I am with pictures or moving images, so I’ll keep on blogging. Even if hardly anyone reads it. It’s a good outlet for me.

If I hadn’t clicked those links on my friend’s blog that day, I genuinely don’t know if I would ever have started blogging. And if I hadn’t started blogging, how would I have dealt with everything in my head in my full-on parenting days?

Fifteen years on, I’m still a mum, I’ve still got three kids and this is still my world.