Thanks to Teena in Toronto for pointing out that my blogoversary was this past weekend. Can’t say for certain where my brain was but I had no idea that I was so close to the date when No Ordinary Homestead was born from the pieces of all my other blogs. On September 17th, I will have been blogging for 5 years and I have to say it’s been an amazing journey!

In the last few months, you saw me take a forced hiatus while I healed and our ideas for the future changed dramatically. What we thought would be a summer packed with home projects and improvements on the farm (which certainly would have turned out to be expensive) quickly became a time of reflection as we realized that the original goals we had been chasing had actually slipped from our minds and we needed to get back on track. I’m not quite ready to talk about our great ideas for the future but if you bear with us and hold on for the ride, you know I’m going to spill the beans eventually.

It was a year in which we finally thought we would go the distance with our garden and even start a nice space to garden in our courtyard, but boy were we wrong about that. And considering what happened to us and the way our weather has been, it’s certainly a good thing we didn’t get all the stuff started that we wanted to grow.

I had my very first Reddit.com explosion for NOH this past year. My how to make vanilla extract recipe was featured on the front page of Reddit and there were over 10,000 visitors to NOH that month. I have to admit I was pretty stunned!

In fact, the traffic to NOH has just been mind blowing over the last year and I can’t wait to see where things go in the coming year. Maybe we’ll hit 15,000 visitors in one month…or even 20,000…It’s definitely going to be exciting! We’re also climbing ever closer to the 200 mark on Facebook, with currently over 180 fans.

I had a scare in May that all of my posts had been lost…but thankfully that was not the case. But it did remind me that backups are your friend and after multiple computer failures in the past year, I know you can never back up your data often enough!

There was also a complete site redesign of No Ordinary Homestead and the new layout has made a huge difference. Do you remember when we still looked like this? I can’t believe it was November last year when I made the switch…seems like it was a million years ago!

I did my very first guest post and made some wonderful new contacts…plus I got to gab about our new aquaponics setup which is still running like clockwork and has it’s first tomatoes and chilies growing in it. I hope I’ll be able to do posts on several more blogs in the future and have a few great bloggers share their knowledge here as well!

You saw Mackenzie grow another year older as she approaches her second birthday and you celebrated all the ups and downs of parenting with us.

There have been more giveaways and contests than ever before and I’m so excited about the number of people that are participating now. And you can be sure that in the coming year, I’ll be doing even more!

And in more business related stuff, NOH readers have been able to subscribe to my daily updates for a long time now (as well as RSS feeds on their favorite reader) but for those people that simply didn’t have time to read all the daily emails, there’s now a way for them to get their NOH fix too…with bi-weekly NOH recaps. It’s something fun I thought I’d put together to highlight the posts from the last two weeks, maybe bring up some other posts that we’ve all forgotten about and share other random and special things with you guys. I might even start doing a few exclusive giveaways through only the mailing lists…are you subscribed yet? 😉

Thanks for your support and love…and for those of you who have been lurking in the shadows, reading me for ages, I just want to say thanks for sticking with me. I know you’re out there even if you aren’t ready to show yourself to the rest of the world! I’m looking forward to all that the next year will hold!