A year of blogs

I can't believe I started this blog a year ago today.  Man, a lot has happened.

Having this blog has been very good for me.  In the beginning, when no one knew about it, I was able to put down what was happening in our lives, and speculate on what was going to happen.  It enabled me to unburden myself, without jinxing our upcoming adventure.  As our plans began to evolve, and we began to make it known to people that our lives were in for a huge upheaval, it enabled those close to us to know what was going on.

Once we had done our 'look and see', we had a mad month in which we basically sold and gave away a big chunk of our possessions, said our goodbyes, to friends first, and then family.

Then it was time to begin our biggest adventure as a family to date.  The boys have both started schools, and settled in now.  They have just finished their first year here, Oliver finished 1st grade, and Isaac completed his first year in a Montessori school.  I am exceptionally grateful to Paul's company for giving our boys these opportunities, ones we would never have been able to afford in the UK. Paul has been in his new job role for 9 months, and has had plenty of opportunity to travel, the furthest being to Duluth in Minnesota, then driving back to South Carolina via Wisconsin, Illinois (stopping in Chicago), Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee then back here.  He has also spent a lot of time at Talladega Motor Speedway, and Carolina Motor Speedway.

We are exceptionally lucky to have travelled a fair bit since being here.  Obviously we have checked out places locally, but we have managed to go further afield.  We took a trip for my birthday to the Great Smokey Mountains in Tennessee.  We were lucky enough to take a trip to Tybee Island in Georgia when my mum came over at Easter.  We then headed to McClellanville with some friends at the end of last month.  Again another good trip.

This blog has been a learning experience.  It started out very basic, but I feel it is gradually coming along.  I have changed the layout a bit at times, and recently added labels.  Just before Christmas, I started using Pintrest.  Thanks to this site, my most viewed post is this!  I have recently posted my blog to a couple of expat blogs, on the recommendation of a friend who has been an expat in France.  You can find the sites I am on here  and here, but I must remember to go in and add their links to this blog..... I still have to get my head round how sharing blogs works, but I will find it out in due course me thinks.

For now I want to say thank you for reading this blog, it is a pleasure to write, albeit a little after the fact sometimes.  Often living life gets in the way of writing about life, and there is nothing I want to do about it.