I’m not sure I had much of a long-term vision for my blog when I started it up nearly 5 years ago as we prepared to welcome Alex into the world. I knew I wanted to share photos and stories, largely for my family who live around the world and therefore wouldn’t be able to witness every stage of Alex’s development in person.  But I certainly didn’t imagine I’d still be blogging as he prepares to begin school and that I’d have managed to write 200 posts about our family life!

To mark this milestone, I’ve given the blog a bit of a facelift! I’ve contemplated changing its name for a while as I really regretted putting our surname into the overall title and URL – so I’ve finally taken the plunge and, thanks to feedback from friends on Facebook, this is now “Diary of a Herne Hill mum“. Of course, it’s not hard to figure out who we are, but I hope making it more anonymous will make it just a little harder to find if Sophie is one day running for Prime Minister or Alex is a celebrity!

I’ve also sorted out a proper URL – so it’s now the easier to remember www.hernehillmum.com.  How professional looking!

I’ve got lots of more I want to do to improve it, but this’ll do for now.  I hope you like it – do let me know what you think!

Looking back over the past 200 posts, I can lose hours to happy memories and am amazed at how much we’ve done and how much the children have changed.

It all started with us sharing the first scan pictures of Alex and then his arrival in the world in September 2010.  The shock of the first three months saw almost nothing on the blog and I nearly didn’t carry it on, but I picked it up in January 2011 with a little post and a video of a giggling baby Alex that never fails to make me smile.

I’m so glad I carried on with the blog.  I love remembering all the things we’ve done, from our ordinary weekends in London, to our holiday adventures, and some of the big milestones like the arrival of little Sophie, Alex and Sophie turning one year old and my returning to work.

Moving forward, I hope to try and participate in more online initiatives like the Siblings Project, Me and Mine and others – I love the impetus it gives me to try and capture particular things in pictures.  And of course, I’ll carry on writing about our normal life (at least until the children are too embarrassed to let me!)…

Thanks for reading

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