I have to admit that Pinterest is still a bit of a mystery to me. I mean, I understand it and I know it is basically a search engine, but I haven’t quite figured out how to make it drive traffic to my blog yet. It’s just another one of those things that seems to need a lot of time put into it, and at the moment that’s time I don’t have! Read more
I love Instagram (most of the time) and it’s the social media platform I’ve focused most of my energy on for the last year. I’ve written before about how I use Instagram for microblogging, although I haven’t been posting quite as regularly of late. I’m even embracing Instagram stories when I remember!
Anyway, today isn’t about me, rather I’m going to share 10 Instagram accounts that I love to follow, and that I think you should too! Read more
I joined Facebook on 6th June 2007, 10 years and 4 months ago. It was just 9 months after Facebook had opened up to anyone over the age of 13 who had an email address. Before Facebook I had been on Bebo (I had actually completely forgotten about it until I saw a mention of it on my early Facebook timeline!) and before that Friends Reunited had helped me find some old school friends. Read more
I apologise now that this is going to be a bit of a brain dump post – it’s been bubbling away in the back of mind for a while now and I think that writing about it might make me feel better and be able to move on from it…
I don’t think I know anyone who doesn’t use social media in some way or another (except perhaps my dad) and I am no exception. Don’t get me wrong, I love social media – I remember when I first got Facebook, over 10 years ago now, and I was so excited to find people I went to school with and see what they were up to (although I’d already been doing that a bit with Friends Reunited, remember that?), it also meant I could connect with people I’d worked with overseas, people I hadn’t spoken to for years. Of course I also became Facebook friends with people I knew in real life and saw regularly anyway too. Read more
Well, things have got off to a flying start in the world of Toby Goes Bananas! I’m amazed and delighted by the number of people who have read, commented, liked, followed and all the rest off it. And so the latest addition to the blog is (hopefully) the chance to follow on Bloglovin’ too…that is if I’ve managed to do this right!
Thanks for all the support so far and hopefully here’s to many more posts to come.
I first published this post on my other blog We Must Be Bold on 5th September. I know copying it over here is cheating a bit but it seemed relevant to what I’m starting with Toby Goes Bananas so I decided it was allowed! I haven’t edited the post at all, so here it is…
…So, since last time I wrote our baby boy arrived in the world and unbelievably he is already 8 weeks old! In a way it’s flown by but equally it’s hard to remember what life was like before he turned up. He’s amazing and he makes me smile every day but they weren’t kidding when they said being a parent is hard. Looking after a newborn baby is singularly the hardest, most frustrating and stressful thing I have ever done. I think I have probably cried more in the last 8 weeks than I have in the last 8 years. I might have read a dozen parenting books, gone to all the antenatal classes and listened to advice from everyone who gave it but nothing prepared me for the sleep deprivation, the worry (What’s wrong with him? Am I doing it right? Why is breastfeeding so bloody painful?) and sheer amount of effort that a newborn baby needs. The health visitor said to me the other day ‘everyone loves their baby but it can take a while before you actually like them’ and I reckon she’s right. Apart from looking at his beautiful face and wondering how we managed to create this tiny, perfect human there is very little reward in looking after a new baby. You feed them, change them, hold them, sing to them, rock them, feed them and change them some more, and in the beginning the best you can hope for is a baby that isn’t crying! But already our little one is starting to smile, starting to really look at you when you’re talking to him or feeding him and it’s starting to feel like a real relationship. I can’t wait to see him continue to grow and develop and turn into a wonderful, walking, talking little boy.
Which sort of brings me to the point of this blog. Watching a baby grow and develop is amazing – I’m so proud of my little boy when he does something new, or just looks particularly cute, and I want a record of that. So I take pictures and I post them online with little updates about today’s progress. I do this for me and for my husband but also for our baby’s grandparents who all live over 300 miles away and don’t get to see him that often. And I admit it’s also just to show off a bit to all my friends – ‘look at this tiny human that we made, isn’t he amazing!’. But I’ve seen a few different people mention recently that there is perhaps something wrong with filling the Internet with photos and information about our children – are we robbing them of the option of privacy in the future? I do think a bit about what I’m doing when I post yet another photo online…but while our little one is still a baby I don’t think I’m really doing any harm. I don’t think I would be bothered if there were baby photos of me online – photos of my dodgy perm and massive glasses when I was 13 might be a different matter and by the time my son gets to that I’d age I’d like to think I’ll give him the final say about what, if anything, I post about him on the Internet. There’s no question that this issue is something we should consider in this new digital age – it certainly isn’t something our parents had to think about. But are we creating a massive problem for the future privacy of our children? I’m not sure…