A break from Sunday Posts to celebrate a milestone on That Wife…

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Today marks the 365th consecutive day that a post has gone up on That Wife within a 24 hour period. Within that time I have published 543 posts, received almost 10,000 comments, and gained over 1,000 subscribers according to Feed Burner.

Wow. WOW.

I set the 365 days of blogging goal in order to prove to myself that I could make time for writing posts, a discipline I hope to hold onto even after the baby comes (and the rest of the babies after that). I didn’t define the goal very clearly in the beginning (just 365 days of blogging), and I didn’t actually sit down and write something every day. Over time it developed into an attempt to simply make sure that a post went up on my blog every single day for a year. Sometimes I wrote multiple posts in a day and published them all a few hours from each other because I was so excited to see what you had to say. Other days I wrote all of my posts for the week in a single day and scheduled them to go up at a specific time.

I hope my writing has improved during that time. I have developed the ability to write a post about almost anything, and I find myself frequently writing down post prompts for future posts. I now have so many posts I want to write that I never get around to most of them! 543 posts later and I still have an incredible amount of things I want to say. If you’re someone who feels like you “have nothing to blog about”, I would encourage you to start keeping a running list of possible topics, ranging from the most important things on your mind to the most mundane.

Blogging has become one of the most important things in my life, and at this point the only thing I do more maintain That Wife and Jenna Cole is sleep. I’m pretty sure I spend more time with the blog than I do with That Husband. Your comments have the power to ruin or make my day, and often both happen over and over within the same 24 hour period. Tears have definitely been shed, but more often than that I’m exclaiming excitedly to TH about the newest comment someone left that has me smiling or laughing or thinking about things in a different way. I’ve held strong to my policy of approving all comments (barring those of the type listed here) and I’ve enjoyed most of the debates that have ensued because of the threaded comment system. This blog could not be what it is without those of you who not only comment once, but come back and keep commenting over and over on the same post to keep discussion moving along!

Some of you have already asked what my plan is now that 365 days of blogging has come to an end, (and many of you have expressed disappointment about not waking up to a new post each day, thank you so much for the self-esteem boost!) and the short answer is that I’m not committing to anything quite yet. Right now writing a post each day is a habit, and I love waking up to comments in my inbox each morning. On the other hand I would like to write posts on a more regular basis for Jenna Cole Photography and I’ve committed to writing a weekly post for Elizabeth Anne Designs Living and I haven’t been doing a very good job up until this point.

I can tell you that I have an exciting week of giveaways coming up (so don’t stop reading yet!), and that I have entirely too much to say about pregnancy and the rest of what’s happening in my life to give up posting regularly. For this next year (or at least until the baby comes) I would like the focus of my posts to be quality not quantity so you might not wake up to a new post every morning, but you’ll hopefully find yourself thinking the things that I do post are some of the best you’ve seen from me thus far.

A big thank you to those who have been visiting and commenting since the beginning, and to those who have joined in the discussion along the way. I’m not sure I would keep writing if it weren’t for you. I count so many of you as my friends and I look forward to what the future brings for all of us!

Psssst…..
If you’re feeling excited about your chances of winning something in my big giveaway, you might want to leave a few comments on this and other posts, even if you’ve never done so before (especially if you’ve never done so before!). I think you’ll regret it if you don’t!

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