Week 1 Done And 546 For My Birthday - R2BC

DD playing with her friend's little brother in the park.
She's very good with little children. 

Here are my Reasons 2B Cheerful for this week. The linky is back with Michelle on Mummy From The Heart for the month of September.

1
Survival
Just getting through the first week of school is a worthy R2BC. This is what it was like... The children are all in different years obviously, so you get confused when talking about e.g. 5th Grade Girls and you actually mean 6th Grade Girls except when you really do mean 5th Grade Girls but the person you are speaking to is thinking 4th Grade Girls.

Some of the teachers have changed classes. They changed the places of the classrooms. We are all scrambling to finalize out timetables to fit in all sorts of groups and one-to-one tutoring so that the children involved don't miss anything vital. And the kids themselves are only given schedules day by day until it's all finalized. So when you ask a group (made up of pupils from three different classes) if we can meet on Thursdays in the 2nd lesson, they don't know because it's only Monday and they won't know what's happening on Thursday until Wednesday afternoon.

It's amazing how an early start and a full day of work can be so exhausting when you've been used to the long, lazy summer holidays. DD and I found ourselves struggling to keep our eyes open in the early evening at he begining of the week. By Thursday we were getting used to it but I still managed to keep to the planned 'in bed by 8 pm' for DD and 11 pm for me (well sometimes 12).

2
My Birthday
By vainly trying to hide my age, I apparently turned off the whole birthday notification thing on facebook. For one second I was upset that I'd not got 300 Happy Birthday greetings. Then I realized that it didn't really matter.

I got some lovely messages from good friends on Whatsapp, my cousin and a friend from LA emailed, my mum skyped, and one friend messaged me on facebook to say he remembered anyway (which is how I knew that I'd done a facebook fail). It was fine. I didn't need anything else and after day two at school, I was too tired to celebrate anyway.

However..... I blogged about it and then the messages came. They were even more special because a blog post requires a higher level of engagement than just responding to a notification with 'happy birthday x'.

3
Blogging
After a year of trying to claw my way back into the top 1000 blogs in the TOTS100 ranking, I suddenly jumped about 700 places back to 546 (555 in August and 546 in September). It was the only best birthday present I got. If I can get back into the top 500 it displays that on the badge on my blog.

I was once in the top 100 for about two months - back in the day when they had about 700 UK parent blogs registered. Then they jumped to 3,000 and I managed to stay in the top 500 for years. Now blogging has become a professional career in the advertising and PR fields and there are around 6,000 UK parent blogs registered with TOTS100.

I'm thrilled with 546 but I'm not sure how it happened. Maybe it's simply a matter of blogging more often - I posted 16 times in August. I certainly don't keep up with Instagram or Twitter much, which are two of the variables in the ranking equation. Maybe all the professional bloggers were away enjoying free promotional holidays during July and August so there were only actually 546 of us blogging over the summer?

I decided to join Jax in her Making It up Blogtember 30 Day Challenge. It's now September 8th and this is only my fourth blog. I've not given up entirely but mine might be only a 25 day challenge. And next month I may be back down in the 1,000s but I'll always treasure my 546 for my birthday.