Nine years of blogging!

I was surprised this morning to realise that it's nine years today since I started blogging! This is my 2,818th published post. Who knew that I'd be still doing this nine years later? That means that I've been blogging more than half the time we've been in Japan (which was 17 years last December).

Lots has changed in nine years! For you too, I suspect.

Nine years ago:

• I was living in a different suburb of Tokyo.

• I had one boy in elementary school at CAJ, one in Japanese kindergarten (about to graduate), and one eager to start any kind of out-of-house schooling.
• I was home schooling the younger two in English.
• I was about to embark on full-time homeschooling for the first (and only) time.
• that filled the gap for our middle son between Japanese kindergarten and starting in the middle of grade one in Australia because...
• We were about to go on our second home assignment.
• Outside being a mum I had few roles:
• conversation English teaching at the kindergarten
• desktop publisher of a newsletter for missionaries working with Japanese outside of Japan
• critique partner for three other writers (which is where I started learning editing skills)

I was looking forward to seeing my youngest start school, so that I could do some other things, especially I was planning on starting work with the editor of Japan Harvest after our home assignment.

Well, things have changed a lot since then! I've now got almost too much on my plate, though admittedly my boys are a whole lot more independent than they were and I've got a lot more time to do things other than be a mum. Or that being a mum can be done in tandem with more than I used to be able to do, for example, I did a lot of editing work this morning despite having two boys home on a student-free day. That wasn't possible nine years ago! Mothering also isn't as exhausting as it used to be.

Well, I've got no intention of ceasing blogging. As I wrote on the 7th anniversary of this blog: 

• [Blogging] helps me process life as it's going on in my life.
• It's fun to look back on things I've recorded (like a public diary, I guess).
• Connecting with other bloggers (though that seems to be happening less and less, I've outlasted many who were blogging seven years ago).
• It's a great vehicle for sharing things I'm learning.

I don't know if I'll get many replies, but I want to challenge you to write a comment on this post (or on FB, if that's where you came from). You can just say hi, tell us how you found out about this blog, tell us what you were doing nine years ago, or share a random fact. Got for it!