Letting Go of Mie's First Anniversary

It was 1 year ago today that I decided to make-over my blog.  Previously titled "Life of Auntie Mie", I decided to re-purpose my little home here in an effort to be intentional with writing down our experiences primarily in foster care and therapeutically work out what God was doing in my life.  I had come to the point in my life's journey where I had realized that I could not be in control of my own life and the more I tried to hang onto that control the more the lesson about letting go was beat into mie.  Hence the title and, at least to mie, the theme of my writing.  2011 was no exception as we dealt with a few more surprises in life, not the least of which was adopting our 4th foster placement and subsequently watching as her parents chose to place her sibling with another adoptive home.

I am still not in control.  (Shocking, I know).

I am so grateful I took on this effort.  I spend a lot of time each day on this blog and reading those on my reading list.  Sharing my story, providing a personal example of a foster family, writing all this down....it really does wonders for my sanity.  I truly treasure the circle of friends I count on to read and comment, many of whom share their own experiences and whom I look forward to "visiting" each day.  I feel like I'm part of this larger community, whether or not many of us have met in person, that is out there one step at a time trying to make a difference, often struggling to get through certain things that are thrown at us, but getting back up and trying again because we know what we're doing is ultimately the right thing, even though it is hard and painful at times.

I love looking at my stats, not only because it encourages mie to know how many people stop in on a daily basis but also to see what they're looking at and how they got here.  I only had about 1,000 visits prior to 2011 which makes it easy to track 2011's stats using the "all-time" option through blogger's stats.  Here are some things I find interesting:

• I had approximately 16,000 visitors in 2011.  This works out to 1333 per month or 43 per day.  
• Not including weekends (where I don't often post new things) or vacations, I typically have about 100 visitors per day.  I currently have 46 followers.  That's down by one from yesterday.
• June was my busiest month last year with 2151 visitors.  February was by far the slowest with only 580.
• My most popular post continues to be Sleep Habits of a Toddler.  Of the 10 search keywords that land people here, 7 have to do with toddlers who aren't sleeping.
• Two posts are giving sleepless toddlers a run for its money.  Foster Care - God's Model for Parenting  will pass up sleepless toddlers in no time.  Tuesday's Tears - Verbal Abuse isn't far behind.  The first doesn't surprise mie, the second does, but I think it's frequently read because abuse/verbal abuse happens to be something that is frequently searched?
• Wendi over at "Life in the..." sends the most people my way, by far.  On a daily basis, about 40-50% of my traffic heads over to mie after visiting her.
• I was really, really touched when I received my first blog award.  I felt like a real blogger.  :)
• I have 413 published comments.  I have one perpetually unpublished comment.  I don't know what to do with it - it has personal information so I don't want to publish but it's encouraging so I don't want to  delete it.
• I have 281 posts.  91 were written prior to the 2011 revamp.  That means I wrote 171 posts in 2011, not as frequent as I would have liked.

I often wonder how this compares to other people, because, you know, that's important :)  

I also often wonder where all this will lead.  I'm not doing it to go in any particular direction, but I do wonder how my passion that I hint at through this blog will further be developed in my life in the future.  I have started speaking and know that I'll probably do more writing in the future.  The difference compared to a year ago is that I know wonder how things will turn out instead of knowing how I'll make them turn out.

It appears I may have made some personal progress after all.