Blogging my Heart #1

Welcome to Blogging my Heart #1. You are very welcome

To blog or not to blog?

Over the last few years I have necessarily needed to put my beloved blog on hold, so I could maintain homeschooling my youngest two girls whilst looking after Charlotte. Charlotte’s health remains tenuous, but I think she is gradually getting better. But it is a two steps forward, one step back situation.

I love blogging.

It is a little bit of my heart in print ❤️

I also feel so passionately about the possibilities of homeschooling. And I want to share that and perhaps encourage newbee homeschoolers to live their best life courageously and joyously.

Giving up my blog altogether did cross my mind, but writing is something I enjoy so much I quickly dismissed it.

I thought about starting another blog all together, maybe as an indication that my time of life is changing. The idea of perhaps taking my seasons of joy posts and making them into a blog appealed, but I wasn’t really sure I could maintain that with any longevity.

So I dismissed that also.

In the end, I kept coming back to Angelicscalliwags. It feels like home to me. I’ve poured my whole heart into it over the years. I’ve shared our successes with smiling glee, and our struggles with tearful honesty.

Angelicscalliwags is the story of our lives together.

And I’m reluctant to end that story just yet.

Blogging Schedule.

I’ve gone back and forth about whether I want to commit myself to a blogging schedule, especially when I head back to studying in September. It may be that I simply won’t have the time to blog as I do now I’m not studying.

The thing is, I LOVE blogging. It’s an incredibly enjoyable outlet for my creativity.

So, all this to say, I think I’d like the gentle kick up the backside a schedule may offer…

So, here goes:

Monday will be a homeschool post;

Tuesday will be an updated post;

Wednesday will be a homeschool post;

Thursday will be an updated post;

Friday will alternate between the Homeschool Log, Precious Moments, Seasons of Joy and Blogging my Heart.

Updating Old Posts.

I’ve been writing my blog for ten years. Ten years! But back in the day, I knew nothing about blogging, or making my content available on Google, or how to optimise my posts and my images for search engines. Over the years I picked up a bit of knowledge here and there, but to be honest, I haven’t really had the time to put it into practice.

I have written 1623 posts and taken over 25000 photos to place in those posts. Unfortunately, only those written in the past couple of years are optimised so that Google knows to send people over.

My goal over the next few months is to firstly optimised each post (some I will just update, others I will repost) and secondly to optimise each photo.

This is going to be an enormous amount of work, but will hopefully make my blog more readable and more discoverable.

In these blogging posts, I intend to share what I am learning so that homeschooling mums out there, who want to begin recording their family’s home school journey in a blog, can learn all the things I wish I’d learnt ten years ago.

My Monthly Newsletter.

I have started to write a monthly newsletter (literally, I’ve written one 👍). I have created a pop up for anyone to sign up, and I will perhaps leave an option to sign up at the end of each post. I don’t want to advertise it too much at the moment, because I’m still learning how to actually run everything newslettery!

I’m hoping my monthly news letter will contain snippets of homeschool news across the world; freebie note pages and (second-hand) book giveaways, opportunities to write for me and/or be interviewed for my blog, and behind the scenes stuff that won’t go on my blog. I have also created a homeschool planner (it’s not available yet as I’m still tweaking) which will be available for all newsletter subscribers.