Playing Favourites

Playing favourites with my blog, not my children!

As a parent I have always told my three daughters that I don’t have favourites and I don’t. They all have something unique about them and I love seeing how different they are to each other while at the same time being so similar it scares me!   They tend to use any opportunity to play each other off against the others and we all have a good laugh together despite how competitive it gets at times.

But when it comes to posts on my blog I do have a few old faves.  Did you know I have a page on my blog that lists all my ‘special’ posts in one place, and yes, they’re usually ones that involve my family!  It’s appropriately called Favourites – ‘I’m proud of…’

Recycling

Suzie, over at Suzie Speaks (a blogging guru and a lovely gal to boot), recently wrote a post about recycling old blog content which got me thinking.  I have been blogging since 2012 but only consistently since mid 2013.  This means I have a lot of posts that I wrote years ago when things were different – back when I had a full time job; when I didn’t have as much time on my hands; when I was really raw; when I didn’t really know anything about what I was doing in regards to blogging.

If I’m honest, not much has changed in the intervening years in some ways,  but at least I think I have a bit more of a handle on this whole blogging thing now! I’m still here and enjoying what I do so that’s a plus and says something. One of the down sides of blogging is that people just disappear from your reader and emails and you never know why.  I have lots more followers now and I am trying to embrace Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest in order to stay current, but it’s a real struggle at times.

What this means is I have a lot of posts that haven’t seen the light of day for many years!!  I’m reluctant to trash these old posts as they are a part of my blogging journey and say a lot about what was going on in my life at the time.

In her post Suzie listed a few suggestions on how to recycle old content and one of them was :

Create a summary post – linking in a selection of your favourite older posts that your newer audience may not have seen.

So that’s what I decided to do! I’m good at following advice 🙂

Throwback Thursday

Last week I participated in Suzie’s #ThrowbackThursday and shared an old post from October 2013.  It was a post from a series of which I’m really proud. It started with me talking with my daughter about her life at 28 and then I compared my life at the same age.  I went on and talked with my other two daughters and did the same reflection on how different my life was to theirs at the same age.  I went one step further and compared my mother’s life to mine when she was 53 – they were all delightful conversations and I enjoyed writing the comparisons.

Some readers might not be aware of these favourites so I have decided to share them again.  I am planning to update these posts when things change for the girls – we have had one wedding and another is planned for later this year so there are already major changes to update.  Maybe I’ll look at updating them on major birthdays just for fun!

I have included some snippets from each post below but have also included the link so you can go and check out the whole post if you’d like to.

This is the first post I wrote (and shared last week for Throwback Thursday) –

 Life at 28, mother and daughter compare lives – My middle daughter just happened to be visiting when I read an article that started me on this path, so she was the first one I compared.  Our lives were very different at age 28! Here’s a snippet:

Sarah & I talked about the many differences in our lives at this age.  The main one being that at 28 I was the mother of 3 daughters under 5 years of age, having just given birth to Eliza our final child that year.  Grant & I had been married for nearly 9 years and were buying our own little house in Newcastle.  Sarah on the other hand is enjoying life with her partner, Ben, with neither a wedding nor a baby in sight.  In her words, she is as free as a bird.

I hadn’t gone to university after finishing high school and wouldn’t until I turned 40 years of age, whereas Sarah enjoyed a year after high school living & working in Italy before returning home to undertake a university degree in International Studies.  She is planning to return to study in 2014 to do her Masters while working full time as well.

Considering Sarah and Ben are now married this is one major change that has happened!  I was also very brave sharing a photo of myself at 28 and one of Sarah at 28!  She looks considerably better than me 🙂

My eldest daughter lives in the UK and was home for a quick 10 day visit so I used this opportunity to interview her resulting in Mother and daughter at 30 and a bit… One of the major differences in our lives is the role technology plays as discussed here:

She is very different to me at that age in that she has no children, she isn’t married, she has a career, she lives a very different lifestyle in a foreign country and has a strong network of friends who support her given that she lives on the other side of the world away from all of her family. Despite this distance Melanie has a very strong sense of family and feels that we are a close knit family despite living a long way away. She has a busy life and takes some ‘me’ time with her on-line business ‘Debbie’s Daughter Photography’, going to see movies, shopping, friends, and enjoying the contact that social media gives her – Facebook, twitter, Instagram, blogging and her own website.

This is something that is very different to when I was her age – if you wanted to interact with someone you rang them for a chat, now she can know what’s going on in Tumbarumba before I do, by seeing it on Facebook.

During Christmas in 2013 I took the opportunity to talk with mum about our different lives at my age at the time, of 53 and this is the post I ended up writing – Mum and me at 53 . One of the major things she noted was attitudes:

I think I have grown up in a different time with community expectations very different to mum’s generation. Mum feels that I have had more freedom and have taken the opportunity to travel on my own which she didn’t have the chance to do. She’s unsure she would have taken the opportunity had it arisen anyway. Earlier this year I travelled on my own to UK, Denmark and Sweden for four weeks, leaving Grant home alone with no meals prepared for him. In mum’s day this just wouldn’t have happened.

At the age of 53 our lives don’t appear to be so very different, we are both still married to the same husband we married in our youth, our three children have grown up and gone their own ways, we both worked full time and we have both travelled extensively. The world is a different place in many ways and mum deplores some things – like people not making an effort to dress up to go out these days, the lack of manners and consideration, rudeness, swearing, bad language, and thinks there is far too much emphasis on money, possessions, wealth and acquiring ‘things’. I have more relaxed views on these subjects and am fairly easy going I think.

My final post in this series was about my youngest daughter who was 25 at the time, Last but by no means least – Eliza and I at 25

Eliza feels that her life is a struggle at times although she says she is quite content. Her life isn’t what she expected, as she didn’t expect to be living in Queensland and she never expected to be a sailing instructor, having grown up in rural NSW. Life is harder as a grown up than she thought it would be. She would like to stay as free as a child without the responsibilities that being an adult brings. Money is an ongoing issue and getting ahead is difficult. Being the youngest of three girls she feels she always has to keep up with her sisters, though no one has ever expressed this, it’s just the way she thinks. She has a friendly, bright and bubbly personality and is a delight. I think she suffers from a lack of self confidence at times but as her mother I think she should be happy with what she has achieved and what she has done in her 25 years.

In 1985 at age 25, I was a mother of 2 little girls, having just had Sarah earlier in that year and Melanie was just over two; I had been married for almost six years and we were in the process of buying our little house in Georgetown in Newcastle. Life was a struggle for us too, being on only one wage with two babies & paying our house off. But Eliza wasn’t aware of our struggling times as she wasn’t even born then. I had to grow up and be very responsible very quickly. Life wasn’t always fun for me at 25. It’s much more fun now when I am more affluent and comfortable with myself and my circumstances. These things take time to achieve and if I could tell Eliza one thing it would be that all things pass, you just have to make the most of it and get on with it.

Eliza and Shawn are getting married in Fiji in October this year so I get to be Mother of the Bride (MOB) all over again!

What more can I say but this –

Family is a little world made of love. 

Thanks to Suzie for the idea of recycling old posts, I have enjoyed sharing these stories again. I hope you have also enjoyed them especially if you haven’t read them before!

I’m interested if you’ve had similar experiences of sharing stories or is this something you’d consider doing?  I’d love to hear your thoughts, so leave me a comment if you’re so inclined 🙂

I’m now going back to look over some other old posts and see what I can recycle in some other ways.  A reminder that my Favourites page has lots of other interesting special posts.

Deb 🙂

If you’re wondering who I am and what I’m about, you can check out my About me page which was updated recently!  You can also follow Deb’s World on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook.