A Peachy Year • Peachy and Clementine

Diary

A Peachy Year

April 28, 2017 Peachy

Today is a very special day. Mommy and I are celebrating an event that comes around only once and today happens to be the big day. Today marks our one year anniversary of our blogging journey here at Diary of Little Peach. It was on April 28^th 2016 when our very first post was published. Happy first birthday Diary of a Little Peach!

Mommy and I are super excited to celebrate this blogging milestone. It has been an amazing year and definitely a learning experience. To commemorate this event, we thought it would be nice to take a look at the past year to remember, reminisce, and celebrate some of our achievements. Let’s start at the beginning with our very first step on this blogging adventure.

April 2016

Our first blog post was appropriately named Introducing….Me and with it the blogging baby was born. With a total of a staggering 4 views for the month it was our most viewed post in April. Maybe not a great start but we had only been at it for 3 days.

The blogging baby!

May 2016

If you’re Canadian like us, you celebrate Mother’s Day in May. Last year was very special because it was my mommy’s very first Mother’s Day. I couldn’t let the occasion pass by without a Mother’s Day blog post to my mommy. I already have an idea for this year’s Mother’s Day post but you’ll have to wait to read it.

By May I was already eating solid foods and I found some footage on our camera of my first taste of the stuff. The only sensible thing to do was to create my first YouTube video and share the experience with the world. The most viewed post for May was about the adventures mommy and I had on one of our outings around the neighbourhood.

I love adventures!

June 2016

June brought us Father’s Day and I couldn’t let daddy go without his own post to celebrate his first Father’s Day. I discovered another baby in our house! Or at least that’s what I believed at the time. I also started spending some time in the kitchen with mommy that month and I published my very first baby food recipe.

Around this time I started sharing more parenting tips based on my own experiences. I wrote about improving bath time for babies and I created a post with my tips for sleeping through the night. The latter has been my all time most viewed post to date and it was my most popular post for June, July, August, and October. I also managed to create my most watched YouTube video so I guess I was on a roll in June.

Did I do all that?

July 2016

In July I began developing the section of my blog dedicated to all my baby food recipes. I continued to add to it over the next several months but since I left baby food behind, there have been no new recipes. This will be changing in the coming weeks as I am working on some big girl recipes that I will be sharing very soon.

When I wasn’t working on my new recipes, I was busy having adventures like the one in mommy’s closet. My blog post about sleeping from June remained at the top of the most viewed list and June’s post about my bath time tips came in second. It took a while but it seems that people were finally realizing that a baby is the expert in all things baby related.

I am the baby expert.

August 2016

My post about sleep continued to be my top viewed post in August. I continued creating posts that I felt would be useful to babies and parents. I was particularity proud of my steps to better tummy time. I always struggled with tummy time and I was excited to share how I overcame my issues. I also wrote about all the activities I enjoyed as a newborn.

This month I invented a new game to play with daddy. I still love this game but daddy seems rather annoyed by it. I suspect it’s because I’m really good at it now and he feels discouraged. I also tried my hand at working the spoon. I still haven’t mastered that. My second most viewed post was one of my favourites about the day mommy and I had a photo shoot.

I’m so pretty!

September 2016

September was an exciting month. Mommy and I were featured on The Baby Spot. We did an interview and had our pictures published on this respected website. This gave us a little boost and we made it to 100 Twitter followers. We celebrated the event with our first ever Twitter party which we called #APeachyParty. This is also the month that I first launched my Zazzle store.

That summer daddy took some vacation time and I wrote a post about the fun stuff we did. While doing some research I discovered a large amount of abandoned and discarded parenting blogs and that made me sad. Then I decided to give a behind the scenes account of what is involved in being a blogging baby. My most viewed post for that month turned out to be an unsolicited review I did for my favourite snack.

Blogging is hard work.

October 2016

This was such an exciting month for us. For the first time ever we were solicited to do a review! It was an unpaid review that didn’t even involve any product samples but it was the first time a company contacted us and we were thrilled about it. My sleep post from June jumped back into first place in terms of views, but this review was a close second.

Our friends Stephanie and Morgan at #PoCoLo featured us in their blogger showcase. We spent some time in the backyard soaking up the last bit of warm weather. I discovered birds and I had a great time with magic bubbles. This is the month I started getting frustrated with my lazy feet. We celebrated my first Thanksgiving with a post about our preparations and a second post about my impressions of the holiday. At the end of the month I was getting ready for Halloween.

The bubbles were the best!

November 2016

November began with the conclusion of my two-part Halloween post. The work I did on my first unsolicited review was paying off and that post remained at most read while my post about sleep dropped to number two. The third most popular post was one of my baby food recipes.

I did a review all by myself with no influence from mommy. I started being more mobile and discovered that getting around on my own didn’t give me as much freedom as I hoped. I wrote about being wrongly imprisoned and about the time mommy tried to teach me a few things to do with my hands.

The thing I reviewed.

December 2016

December started with my very first birthday. I wrote about our preparations and then about the big day. I blogged about the robot I discovered and the mysterious objects in my mouth. I also realized that standing up was the easy part which sometimes led to sticky situations.

Then something amazing happened and we were offered some free goodies to do another review. That post became my most read for the month. Shortly after that we celebrated Christmas with a two-part post beginning with the anticipation of Christmas and concluding after the holidays. At the end of December we prepared for the new year with our anticipation of New Year’s post.

That’s the robot!

January 2017

With the new year came the conclusion of our New Year’s post. Then it was time for mommy to go back to work but things didn’t go quite as planned. In January I created another YouTube video but my most viewed post this month was about my favourite books.

I had a breakthrough and learned a word which I shared with the world. I wrote about my love of fruit. Somehow I managed to touch music although it didn’t feel quite as I expected it would. I also wrote my very first poem.

I love books!

February 2017

In February we celebrated Valentine’s day. Since it is the month of love, I decided to talk about my love of cheese which became my most viewed post of the month. Then another social media milestone! I reached 500 Twitter followers and of course we had to have a second Twitter party. Once again, our #APeachyParty went live.

I shared a moment in my life that was less than perfect. Mommy and daddy left me with my grandparents for the first time ever so that daddy could get a trophy. This left me wondering why mommy didn’t get a trophy of her own. February was concluded with a surprising snowfall which I took full advantage of.

Snow!!!

March 2017

I was very excited about March because I did another review and this time I included a giveaway for some baby products. That turned out to be my most read post for the entire month. Before January was over I squeezed in another review with a second giveaway.

I wrote about the game I found in every box of chocolate. I finally made some progress in my attempts at befriending the cats. In an effort to be useful, I made a shopping list for expecting parents so that they have an idea of what their newborn baby will need. I also shared some new developments in allergy prevention and best practices for weaning.

My first giveaway!

April 2017

Since I enjoyed hosting the two giveaways in March, I decided to launch a giveaways section on my blog which quickly filled with new giveaways. One of the giveaways is for a charitable organization which I decided to support. Their goal is to empower girls and women in impoverished places. I am very proud to report that this has been my most read post this month.

I was nominated for the Blogger Recognition Award which was a lot of fun to take part in. I prepared for Easter and then searched for chocolate from the Easter Bunny. I co-hosted the #KCACOLS linky run by the fabulous Franca. I wrote a post about a serious issue concerning rice and baby food products that contain it. I shared an unpleasant experience that I had at the playground. Finally, I celebrated my one year blogging anniversary and wrote this post.

That’s me doing Easter.

There you have it. Highlights from my first year as the blogging baby.

What’s Next?

Looking back on the first year of Diary of a Little Peach, I realize how much I have learned. I feel like I accomplished a lot but there are some areas that I think I could have done better. I’m going to put that behind me and call my first year as the blogging baby the learning curve. To make sure that I stay on track for year two, I’m going to set some goals for myself.

I’m going to set an aggressive goal of reaching 300 Facebook likes. That’s just about five times what I managed to accomplish in my first year. I didn’t do much on Facebook for the majority of my first year and I really want to work on this. You can help! I made it super easy for you by including my Facebook widget right there in my sidebar. All you have to do is press the like button.

For Twitter I’m going to set a goal of 3000. My first year got me to about 850. I think this is doable because I didn’t know what I was doing for at least the first six months. You can help with that too! See my Twitter widget in the sidebar?

I want to get more familiar with Pinterest and Instagram. I’m not going to set numeric goals for these just yet as I’m new to these two platforms and I don’t know what’s reasonable. For now I just want to know what I’m doing and become more engaged with the people who use them.

I really enjoyed co-hosting the #KCACOLS. It was my first attempt at co-hosting a linky party and I loved it. I don’t know how much time I’ll have with my high social media goals so I’m going to set a conservative goal of co-hosting at least six linky parties in the next year.

I discovered that I love hosting giveaways. I’m going to search high and low and aim for at least one new giveaway every month. Hopefully more.

Mommy and I would like to get Diary of a Little Peach included in more features. We would also like to get involved in some guest posting. This area needs more research.

Diary of a Little Peach needs a little makeover and some TLC. First order of business is to update my About page. It hasn’t been changed since it went live a year ago. I learned a lot about myself as a blogger and as a person and this page needs to reflect that.

Soon we will need to update our banner since I do look quite different now. I’m becoming a pretty little lady. I certainly have more hair!

Perhaps most importantly, we need to go self-hosted and this needs to happen sooner rather than later. I’m sure it’s going to be a lot of anxiety inducing work. We can only avoid the inevitable for so long.

Happy Birthday!

Whether you’ve been following us for a year, or if this is the first post you’ve ever read, thank you for being here and sharing our one year blogging birthday with us. We hope you’ll stick around and read about the life of this little peach.

Happy Birthday Diary of a Little Peach!

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