little white truths

Towards the end of June, Mex and I packed up our entire house and put everything in storage, then moved to my parents' house (they're overseas).

We did all this in the space of eleven days (yes, we're crazy), starting from the day after we made the decision to move out.

We then spent this last week doing some renovations on our old house, and have given it a good clean and done some work in the garden. In the coming weeks we will look for a bigger place to move into, so there's a lot going on as we speak.

On top of that, as you may know we have a puppy and a baby, so our hands are...shall we say...rather full?!?!

I guess we should be happy that we're hanging on to some measure of sanity. I think.

Anyhoo. I'm giving you some background on what's currently going on to explain why I'm a little late in remembering that I have now been blogging for over a year. Really?! Gosh it's gone quickly.

My first post was on Friday 20 June 2014 (see here). At that point in time, I was in my first trimester of pregnancy and we've now been blessed with a healthy little girl, so it hasn't been a slow year.

I had meant to mark my blog-iversary with a few posts, and since I'm only a little late, I'll do it now and in the coming weeks.

I plan to write something on my top ten reviewed products of my first blog year, the lessons I've learned, my plans for the future of littlewhitetruths, and anything else I can think of. I'm not going to promise that all these blog-iversary posts will come out in the space of a week, considering what we have on our plate. I will aim to have them wrapped up by the end of July.

This post is just a short opening note on the blog-iversary, and the main thing I wanted to say was that I had very few expectations for littlewhitetruths when I started it, and those expectations haven't really changed in the course of this past year.

All I ever wanted from this blog was a place I could come each day and write at least something. As you may know, I'm a writer/editor by trade - but it's rather hard to do that kind of work when you're pregnant and/or have baby brain. At least, it is for me.

While I have enough grunt in me to review beauty products and the occasional restaurant, the novel I was working on last year has been put to the side for now because I don't have the resources and energy for that kind of writing. And although I do plan to go back to work at some point (I work from home anyway, so in theory it's possible with a baby - I said IN THEORY), I haven't gone back yet so this blog will keep plodding along at a similar pace because it's the only writing I'm doing for the moment.

That this blog was intended as a place for me to write each day and have something that's mine - in among all the madness of change - is why I haven't pushed it and tried to gather followers, make it more popular, make more social media connections than I have, get on twitter/instagram/pinterest/whatever else etc etc.

I should do those things, and I may well still do them.

But I just wanted to write. I've done that. I've done the only kind of writing I've been able to manage at the moment, given everything else that's gone on and is still going on.

Littlewhitetruths has quite possibly been the only thing in my life that has not changed over the past year. Honestly, I can't think of one other thing that hasn't undergone some kind of metamorphosis. It has been my one constant. Even my family relationships have changed with the arrival of my daughter - generally in a good way - but as anyone who has had a child will know, having a baby brings shifts you hadn't been able to understand as theoretical things that people tell you about until you'd actually been through them yourself.

In the past year, we've changed cars and have left our house, I've stopped working and writing as normal, I don't have the old daily routine I used to have, and every time I think we've established some kind of picture of what our average day/night might look like at home, my daughter goes through a developmental leap or hits another milestone and things have changed again. This is all off the back of a migration to and from Berlin, since we only returned from there at the end of 2013.

I'm not complaining. Life has been kind to us over the past year, where previously it had been something of an arsehole. For too long.

I'm grateful for the shift, yes. But I'm also grateful to have this one small thing - a little life blog that has focused on something so frivolous as beauty products - that has held steady as our universe spins and swings and as, once more, we are moving.